THE ERASED COMMUNITIES OF THE PANAMA CANAL ARRIVE AT THE VENICE BIENNALE

Tropical hyperstition, decolonial conquest. A twenty-meter hammock hangs at the center of the Panama Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2026. Artists Antonio José Guzmán (Panama, 1971) and Iva Jankovic (Yugoslavia, 1979), the artistic duo known as Messengers of the Sun, confront colonial memory and seek to restore the voices of erased and displaced peoples — and to hear the silenced human cost behind one of modernity's most mythologized engineering feats: the Panama Canal.

In this edition, following Panama's first participation in 2024, the country aligned itself with this year's theme. Curator Koyo Kouoh, who passed away before the biennale opened, proposed an event In Minor Keys — one in which subaltern narratives, spirituality, and subtle forms of resistance against dominant power structures would take center stage. Tropical Hypertition, the Panamanian exhibition curated by Elizabeth González and Mónica E. Kupfer, seeks to set the historical record straight. Since 1903, the United States controlled the Canal Zone, operating as a "country within a country." Panamanians could not move freely through the zone, and the sweeping construction carried out in the name of progress displaced entire communities and flooded historic territories. It also sparked major historical protests and bloodshed — including the tragic events of January 9, 1964 — culminating in the signing of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties in 1977, which allowed Panama to recover full control of the interoceanic waterway in 1999.

Messengers of the Sun recovers those "lost villages" in Venice through textile cartographies, archival fragments, DNA-based patterns, Caribbean rhythms, water, voices, and the mechanical sounds of extraction. The centerpiece is a twenty-meter hammock hanging at the heart of the space. Dyed in indigo and hand-woven, the domestic object connects to the ancestral knowledge of the Americas and to the Afro-Caribbean workers who built the Panama Canal. The use of indigo — historically intertwined with colonial economies and forced labor — charges the fabric with political memory.

In Venice — a city built on water, commerce, and empire — the work takes on an inevitable resonance.

Tropical Hypertition is on view through November 22 at Tesa 42, Arsenale (Fondamenta Casa Nuove, Castello 2738/C, Venice, Italy).