THE VALUE OF SOVEREIGNTY IN MR. BROWN'S GARDEN, EXHIBITION AT THE INTEROCEANIC CANAL MUSEUM

While ships loaded with goods cross the Panama Canal incessantly, Anselmo González Brown's life passes in complete calm. Mr. Brown, an Afro-Caribbean man, occupied, after the reversion of the interoceanic waterway, a vacant lot in the community of Diablo. There, in the face of the frenetic maritime traffic demanded by the immediacy of world trade, a refuge of medicinal plants and fruit trees grew. A territory of "personal sovereignty".

Mr. Brown's Garden, a photographic exhibition by the artist Tova Katzman, brings together an audiovisual archive (2017-2025) that documents the day-to-day life of this character who, despite the changes and evolution of the world, keeps this space in which he maintains his way of life, respecting his territory and his heritage.

The exhibition is structured around the short film The Bittersweet Life of Mr. Brown, photographs and verses by the poet Shyanne Figueroa Bennet, which contrasts the accelerated transit of the Canal in front of the place of contemplation in which the camera must wait patiently for the light to do its work. 

Its curator, Román Flórez M., states that "in this exhibition Katzman's photographic archive and Mr. Brown's botanical archive show us with subtlety some of the symbolic limits that still divide the territory and memory of the country today". He considers the visit to this exhibition as "an opportunity to reflect on our connection with nature, life in the old Canal Zone and the ways in which we approach those territories today".

For the photographer, this medicinal garden in front of the Panama Canal represents "a space of transgression and encounter, without rules or fences".

Tova Katzman is a photographer and video artist originally from Massachusetts, with a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at Austin. His work is grounded in human geography, loss, the built environment, and body research around bodies of water.