DOCUMENTS
The Sweet Burnt Smell of History
By Magali Arriola
What used to be known as the Canal Zone – an area that was simultaneously a military reservation, a company town and a colony – seems to exist today as an apocryphal memory nourished by the nostalgia of those who occupied its lands, and as a geographical ghost that embodies Panama’s colonial and post-colonial history. Eight years after Panama recovered complete sovereignty over that controversial piece of land, the 8th Panama Art Biennial deals with the former American Canal Zone as a historical marker, triggering a reflection on its recent social and political history through the lenses of contemporary visual arts.
Taking Back The Canal Zone: A Challenge For Panama City
By Eduardo Tejeira Davis
Panama City’s peculiar development during the twentieth century can only be understood by taking into account the existence of the Panama Canal Zone, a United States enclave consisting of 1,400 km2, created in 1904 and lasting until 1979. During its seventy-five years of existence, the Canal Zone, which divided the country in half, was in effect a separate country that could be reached from Panama City by simply crossing a street. Today the Panamanian capital has 1,200,000 people (forty times more than at the beginning of the twentieth century), but it still shows traces of that past.
Published in ciudadMULTIPLEcity. Art>Panama 2003. Urban Art and Global Cities: An Experiment in Context, Gerardo Mosquera and Adrienne Samos, editors, Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2004.
The Great Leap
By Adrienne Samos
Edition after edition—in spite of the conservative nature of this country’s art institutions—the Panama Art Biennial has proven to be a sort of thermometer that measures not only the expressive abilities of the younger or more current artists, but also the continuous dynamics of cultural mutations reflected, in some form or another, in contemporary artistic practices.
Published in Artmedia magazine, San José, Costa Rica, January 2006.
Panama without Distances or the Drawing of a Sentimental Cartography
By Rosina Cazali
With the exception of the 7th Panama Art Biennial, I don’t know of a single attempt within the region to put together a biennial through a framework based on reasoning. It follows that one of the most substantial consequences of this effort was the possibility of depicting, through art and from a specific geographical point, the nature and validity of human knowledge in art.
Published in the catalog of the 7th Panama Art Biennial (2006).