Panama presents its second participation as National Pavilion at the International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. As part of the Biennale Arte 2026, the Panama Pavilion will show Tropical Hyperstition, a large-scale installation and performance work by Antonio José Guzmán and Iva Jankovic, the artistic duo known as Messengers of the Sun.
Tropical Hyperstition is set to be a monumental installation and performance work confronting colonial memory, displacement, and cultural survival. At the intersection of art, history, and political memory, Tropical Hyperstition reactivates silenced narratives of communities displaced during the construction of the Panama Canal and the creation of the Canal Zone — a ten-mile-wide territorial enclave governed by the United States for much of the twentieth century. The work positions Panama not only as a global place of passage, but as a territory deeply marked by imperial ambition, logistical power, and the social engineering of colonial modernity.
At the heart of the installation hangs a twenty-meter-long suspended hammock, handwoven from indigo-dyed fabric. The hammock carries multiple genealogies, tracing its origins to ancestral practices across the Americas, where elevation from the ground is associated with protection and life cycles. The hammock was also embedded in the domestic material culture of workers from the Antilles who migrated to Panama to build the Canal.
Artists Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovic and Curators Ana Elizabeth González & Mónica E. Kupfer
In the Panama pavilion, the hammock is transformed into a monumental architecture of refuge — a structure of peacefulness, memory, and survival. It gathers layered histories of Indigenous traditions, Afro-Caribbean migration, and Panamanian nationhood, embodying both shelter and displacement. Indigo blue envelops the space, linking intimacy and landscape, rest and extraction, refuge and historical violence. Long central to Guzmán and Jankovic’s textile practice, indigo is invoked as a material bound to colonial economies, forced labor, and racial hierarchies. As part of the installation, printed fabrics form visual collages incorporating archival photographs and illustrations of the “lost towns” and their inhabitants—spectral presences of eradicated realities. These images are interwoven with patterns derived from Guzmán’s DNA sequences, autochthonous designs, and symbols of ancestral traditions, creating a textile cartography where personal, genetic, and collective memory intersect.
Our work moves beyond the neutrality of the white cube, insisting instead on embodied experience and collective presence. Textiles carry memory, ritual becomes a space for repairing historical rupture, and collaboration with ancestral knowledge opens an ongoing process of transformation. We propose art as a space of emancipation – where sound, cloth, and movement generate new forms of belonging.
For nearly a century, the Panama Canal Zone operated as a country within a country, imposing borders that reshaped daily life, restricted freedom, and produced parallel systems of segregation and control. Entire villages – family homes, commercial structures, local governments, and long-rooted cultural traditions – were forcibly removed. In the name of progress, tens of thousands of people were expelled, their towns erased from maps and gradually from national memory. Now remembered as “lost towns,” these settlements expose the human cost behind the triumphalist narrative of the canal as a civilising feat in a supposedly empty landscape.”
Messengers of the Sun
Republic of Panama Tropical Hyperstition is at Tesa 42 Arsenale, Fondamenta Case Nuove, 2738c, Venice from 9th May to 22nd November, 2026. Find more information here.
