What Remains: Contemporary Art Practices and the Legacies of US Empire in Panama

For nearly a century, the United States maintained a political and military enclave in Panama, the US Canal Zone. With the 1977 renegotiation of the Panama Canal treaties, 553-square-mile Zone was slowly dismantled and former army bases, office buildings, and housing structures vacated as the US withdrew. While some areas—and its characteristic boxy buildings—were repurposed as NGO and governmental office spaces, others met more contingent fates, serving as improvised public housing or overtaken by the jungle. Contemporary artists working in Panama have drawn attention to the afterlives of imperial infrastructure. For over a decade, photographer Rose Marie Cromwell documented a low-income Afro-Panamanian community that moved into former elite army barracks at the army base of Coco Solo, near the Atlantic city of Colón. Cromwell’s socially engaged project shows how US structures became de facto public housing for a community living in precarious conditions beside one of the world’s most vital trade routes. In a recent video performance, filmmaker Ana Elena Tejera traversed the former Canal Zone on foot, moving through overgrown military buildings. Her work underscores both the jungle’s reclamation of these spaces and the vast scale of occupation, with its network of bases and training grounds. At a time when US leadership has called for reclaiming of the Panama Canal, engaged visual and performative approaches call attention to parts of the histories of empire that are often excluded from official accounts, and draw attention to the structures themselves that are left behind—and to what effects.