Section 1: Separation for control, view of the exhibition.
Stories From Beneath The Water
Panamanian Pavilion
Venice Biennale Architettura 2023
Since antiquity, the tropics have been widely recognized as a symbol of exotic beauty, dangerous animals, and luxuriant vegetation. Portrayed as a faraway place, with different histories, languages and cultures, this geographical area represents an amalgamation of qualities that define the fantastic and mysterious nature of reality. Often considered from a western perspective to be a hostile environment to progress, the tropics represent everything that Europe and the United States are not (Lasso, 2019), the antithesis of civilized modernity. The exhibition of the Panamanian Pavilion should provide a counternarrative to this status quo, with Panama as a case study for a future vision of a ‘tropical’ nation, by recovering and connecting its various historical influences.
‘Stories from beneath the water’ focuses on
analyzing three different areas within the former Panama Canal Zone, that address issues of division and integration, namely [1] the divisive architectural structures and systems introduced during the era of the Panama Canal Zone, [2] the erased identities of communities submerged when the waters of the Chagres River were dammed to create Gatun Lake as part of the canal, and [3] the island of Barro Colorado, critically examined as a case study for the theme of the ‘laboratory of the future’, questioning the overlaps between the notions of protection and control.
Collaborators and Contributors:
Jasper Zehetgruber, Désirée Lam Tuñon, Finn Steffens, Conrad Weise, Maik Stricker, Marda Zenawi, Valentin Duggon.
Participants / Research based on the works of:
Marixa Lasso, Dante Furioso, Joan Flores Villalobos, Fahim Amir, Danilo Perez
Photography: Studio Naaro
Year: 2023
Section 1: Separation for control, view of the exhibition.
Section 1: Separation for control
As Spanish influence and colonial control over Panama began to disappear in the early nineteenth century, a first attempt to construct a canal was led
by the French: With a death toll estimated at over 22,000 lives, mainly caused by malaria and yellow fever, the region was immortalized as a place of danger and disease. After the failure of the French,
the United States entered the new nation of Panama with a distinctive vision of imperial administration – the Panama Canal Zone. Less a colony than an engineering enclave, the ten-mile strip of land meant to stand in contrast to its natural and social environment, defining a landscape of modernity.
Within these confines, an ‘othering’ narrative and ideology led to a demarcation of sanitated areas, domestication of the jungle, racial segregation, and depopulation of the ‘zone’ from Panamanians and their cities. This ‘buffer zone’ of protection between the colonizer and the colonized is an architectural structure, creating a liminal space wherein the relationship with the land – one that is threatened because the community is alienated – becomes fundamental, stops being merely decorative, and emerges as a full character (Glissant,1989).
In this first room the visitors’ attention is shifted toward the impacts of the controlling and dividing interventions (zones) defining the former Panama Canal Zone.
Section 1: Separation for control, detail.
Section 2: The magical walkway beneath the surface
Memories have an influence on self-identification and provide continuity between the past, present, and future. They turn into allusions, echoes, and reminiscences that create multiple connotations, defining the complexity of the architectural organism. Given the power of modernism in erasing histories and indigenous languages, local Panamanian communities were lost in the process of the Canal construction, resulting in the domination of a singular ideology of human progress, order, and control.
The destruction of small towns, historical areas, rural settlements, and Panamanian landscapes, evoked feelings of nostalgia for the environment that was and the desire to preserve its image in the collective memory, which is reflected in the recurring theme of the landscape in Panamanian literature.
“Caribbean writers have always had only one referent available to shape the theme and the language of their works: the landscape – insular, oceanic, luxurious, mysterious, and ever-resistant to conquest and appropriation by mapping or “realistic” descriptions. (...) This is one of the basic precepts of the magical realist text. Only the magic and the dream are true because they are the only discursive elements able to present the unpresentable, to speak the unspeakable where the realistic text fails.” (Arva, 2010)
Following this line of thought, the courtyard provides a safe space for reflection, avoiding direct confrontation with colonial trauma, while subverting the western perception of the ‘tropics’ as a ‘magical’ land. Trees recovered from beneath the waters of the artificial lakes of Panama enable the visitors to indirectly confront the traumatic history of erased communities through the canal construction.
Section 2: The magical walkway beneath the surface, view of the exhibition.
Section 3: Separation for protection
Barro Colorado Island (BCI) is a unique space, a hilltop that became isolated in the middle of the Panama Canal when the waters of the Chagres River were dammed to create Gatun Lake, the main passage of the waterway. Set aside by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute as a nature reserve since 1923, today, exactly 100 years later, this island is the most studied tropical forest in the world.
Frequently this island has been advertised as a living scientific ‘archive’ and ‘laboratory’ in which the landscape became both – an object and repository of scientific knowledge.
Discussing the purportedly opposing perspectives toward BCI as ‘a fragment of authentic tropical nature standing at the crossroads of the world’ and its position as ‘a shadow of the former Canal Zone’, this last room of the exhibition questions the history, inclusivity, and legacy of this tropical station.
What is its role in the conservation of local and global biodiversity and ecological research? It is a space of listening, to critically reflect on the connections between control and protection and to imagine a future vision for science and modernity in Panama and beyond.
Section 3: Separation for protection, view of the exhibition.
Floor plan of the exhibition space.