Giana De Dier’s Collages Reassemble Panama Canal Memory
Giana De Dier. Photo by Luna Wallace.
Giana De Dier’s collages restitch the past, tearing across the lie of imperial time to restore our access to ancestors and the worlds in which they lived. Her layered portraits of Black Caribbean women in and around the former U.S. Panama Canal Zone are a palimpsest of memory, and through them she not only subverts the archive but generates one anew.
De Dier’s work examines the experiences of Afro-Caribbean migrants in Panama at the turn of the 20th century following the massive labor migration of these distinct communities from the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean to build, sustain, and operate the Panama Canal. De Dier tends specifically to the subjectivity, memory, and embodiment of Afro-Caribbean women, who have largely been erased in hegemonic representations of Panama Canal history or else made into caricatures—the protagonists only of tourist postcards featuring “Native washerwomen,” or memoirs waxing nostalgic about West Indian domestic workers in the Canal Zone.
Her art practice undermines imperial memory, modeling alternative relations with an archive that, in De Dier’s words, “ridicules the bodies of” Afro-Caribbean women and wields their images toward the production of racist “propaganda.” Indeed, De Dier’s work is animated by a Black feminist speculative impulse. “If you flipped the perspective,” she explains, “and [these laborers] had the chance to write their own story—and there were people who found ways to do that—how different would it have been?” Interested in the absences inherent to the skewed power of colonial archives, she greets Canal Zone photography and archival ephemera with a constant consideration of what else isn’t there.
For De Dier, Panama has always been home, though not as a static site of belonging. She grew up in Rio Abajo, an historically Afro-Caribbean neighborhood in Panama City, and describes her upbringing as “between worlds.” She grew up in a family of Black Caribbean women who worked in the U.S. Canal Zone, while both Panama and the Zone underwent tremendous transformation.
Just a few years before De Dier’s birth, the 1977 Torrijos–Carter Treaty transferred ownership of the Panama Canal to the Republic of Panama, following a long struggle for full Panamanian sovereignty. The U.S. Canal Zone had only recently integrated, forced by the legal victories of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement to end its practices of racial segregation, which had over time become less explicit yet still decisive. De Dier’s sense of “in- betweenness,” then, is one grounded in material reality. Her articulation of liminality is also a feature of Panamanian-Caribbean communities, who have historically lived at the intersection—and at the periphery—of multiple worlds.
Growing up “very maternally,” in a house full of women, De Dier heard stories about her great-grandmother, Amelia, who had migrated to Panama from Barbados. Though her great-grandmother passed shortly before her birth, De Dier always felt a sense of familiarity with her, a knowing transmitted through her relatives’ repeated storytelling about her life. In their home, everyone cherished the family’s migration story, and felt a sense of pride, too, in the contributions of their relatives in shaping the Canal. This kind of ancestral caretaking shaped De Dier’s own sensibilities, and it continues to inform her art practice today. “Women were here, too,” she says of the early Canal Zone. “How do I tell their stories with respect?”
Dominant narratives of the Panama Canal tell a history through the lens of ecological triumph—“man over nature”—and as an exemplar of U.S. technological modernity.
More recently, the Trump regime has reiterated these narratives, doubling down on imperial claims to this infrastructure, while continuing to erase the essential labor of the Black Caribbean men largely responsible for its construction, thousands of whom perished from the dangerous work, and from the negligence of U.S. Canal authorities. And yet, until recently, even the historical accounts that recenter these migrant workers have tended to overlook the Black women who sustained the Canal Zone in numerous ways; these women, as scholar Joan Flores-Villalobos shows, rewrite the history of the Panama Canal through the “labor of social reproduction.”¹ De Dier, however, tends not so much to their labor, but the communalism of their everyday lives. She intervenes on an archive that when not simply ignoring Black women, fetishizes them as domestic workers; instead, De Dier imagines a reconstructed, or alternate past, in which these women occupy the Zone on their own terms.
De Dier marks her intervention in part through a disruption of place as it was. Her 2023 series, Cuidado Comunal Radical y Liberación, reimagines the Canal Zone’s areas of exclusion; not toward a vision of racial integration, but rather, toward a landscape in which Black women simply moved freely and autonomously. First exhibited at the Panama Canal Museum in Panama City during De Dier’s tenure as its inaugural artist-in-residence, her series refuses the spatial boundaries in which Black women were relegated, and transforms spaces defined by the exploited and undervalued labor of Afro-Caribbean immigrants, into landscapes of Black women’s whimsy, ease, and friendship.
One collage shows a young Black woman lounging on the manicured lawn of the Canal Zone’s Administration Building. In a space defined by infrastructure, the Administration Building—as the center of Canal Zone governance—epitomized U.S. imperial dominion over the Zone. Like so much of the Zone, it followed the aesthetic sensibilities of U.S. government architecture: imposing stone constructed on a hill so that visitors would have to look up, surrounded by non-native grass that required constant labor to maintain and that was designed for admiration rather than utility. In this piece, however, De Dier insists on its use, imagining an Afro-Caribbean woman simply taking in the sun on an afternoon. The color contrast between the archival photograph of the building and the line of palm trees leading toward it, and the bold green of De Dier’s paper lawn and the woman’s pink skirt suggest that it is her embodied presence, her act of pleasurable rest, that enlivens the setting.
Giana De Dier, Cuidado comunal radical y liberación.
Another piece in the same series places two Black women together on the porch of the Canal Zone’s Tivoli Hotel, a historic hotel and luxury tourist destination constructed on, like the Administration Building, Ancon Hill. In De Dier’s revised collage of the Tivoli Hotel balcony, two young Black women—perhaps friends—in the graceful silhouettes of cut-out white dresses sit beside each other, smiling, as though in mid-conversation. De Dier has given them upright natural hairstyles—two sets of thick braids on the left, and a full twist-out bun on the right. Each woman holds, respectively, a woven fan and a handkerchief. These are women lounging, enjoying the pleasure of each other’s company and the intimacy of an otherwise empty balcony.
De Dier’s collage here, as always, includes plant life. As in the last collage, it is the women who bring color and vitality to the archival image. Who, in a sense, literally revisit the archive, playfully revising its politics of absence.
Giana De Dier, Cuidado comunal radical y liberación.
Perhaps most compelling to me about the collages in this series is that the photos of Black women at rest are, unlike the background of the images, not drawn from archival collections. Instead, De Dier uses contemporary photos of Black women models in present-day Panama City, staged and photographed in collaboration with Afro-Panamanian queer photographer and sociologist Luna Wallace (herself featured in a collage).
It is this trans-temporal dialogue that makes De Dier’s collage work something more, or other, than a counter-archive. The communalism illustrated in these collages remind me of Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and her inherited recollections of Carriacou, an island in her mother’s native Grenada. Lorde’s childhood imagining of Carriacou seemed nearly mythical; evading cartographic representation in her classroom maps, it was also functionally inhabited only by women, who “survived the absence of their sea-faring men easily, because they came to love each other, past the men’s returning.” That sense of queer friendship, forged through shared leisure and labor between women, pervades De Dier’s collages, too.
Although De Dier subverts normative time and dispenses with fidelity to the “fact” of archival images, she resists the idea that her collages are “made up” or even anachronistic.² “Sometimes people have questioned me, ‘How did you know this happened?’” She counters: “How do you know it didn’t?” De Dier remembers feeling so angry with narratives like Maid in Panama, the 1938 memoir by Sue Core, a white woman who lived in the Canal Zone and centered her recollections on the Afro-Caribbean domestic workers she employed. Filled with racist tropes about Black women, the book also makes disparaging comments about their dress and hair.
“[Maybe] that’s how they looked for you – but on the weekends what did they look like? I know they were getting dressed up,” De Dier says in response. She adds a critique of early 20th-century tourist photography featuring Black women working in the Canal Zone: “All these photographs of Black women looking annoyed because this was not the moment to photograph them.” For De Dier, these dominant archival representations are not just distortions but also records of Black women’s refusal to be legible to a white, imperial gaze.
Giana de Dier, Sistemas formales, ciclos, y pulsaciones.
Much of De Dier’s work, from this series and beyond, is about beauty “About Black women, especially dark-skinned Black women, being held as beautiful,” she says. When she first started with collage portraits, and at her first exhibition at El Museo Contemporáneo de Panamá (MAC) in 2018, she knew she wanted to center a woman like this, and “decided to be more intentional about the association others were making about these figures as Mary’s.” She thought, “Let me force people to have to look up at her.” Her portraits, like those featured in her series, Sistemas formales, ciclos, y pulsaciones, are riveting in the presence and luminescence of their subjects’ direct gaze.
For all their singular beauty, the Black women in De Dier’s collages are never quite alone. They are also almost always accompanied by an added assemblage of flora, Kota reliquary figures, intricate natural hairstyles that expand the height and reach of their bodies; or else, accompanied simply by images of other people – community – contained within them. De Dier works to reflect the memory of the relational worlds these women created together in Panama over many generations; the worlds De Dier herself inhabited.
It is this groundedness that can make parts of ongoing discourse about Black Latinidad
frustrating for De Dier. “For me, [Blackness] was always present,” she says. “No hay nada que preguntar. I don’t give myself space to forget.”
The more interesting questions, for her, are about engaging diaspora as more than just an idea or concept, and rather—like the paper medium of her college practice—making it material through connections with communities in different places. Her recent artist residency in the United Kingdom, at the Delfina Foundation, as well as her upcoming showing in a major group exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery, have allowed her to link the experiences of Caribbean migrants in Panama to those of the Windrush generation in England. “There’s a connection that’s ever present,” she says, forcing her to wonder: “What does diaspora feel like?” And how, importantly, do we represent it outside the visual terms of colonial powers?
Indeed, as De Dier explains, “Empire is not and has never been my authority.”
¹ Flores-Villalobos, Joan. The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal. Politics and Culture in Modern America. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023.
² Other Black women critics have described De Dier as using “critical fabulation,” referencing Saidiya Hartman’s method of archival speculation. See: Dash Harris’s moderated conversation with Giana de Dier at Casa Santa Ana in Panama City, March 2025. My colleague, Angélica Sánchez Barona, too, has used the same language in her own consideration of De Dier's work.
