Panama (Republic of)

Tropical Hyperstition is an installation and performance piece by Antonio José Guzmán and Iva Jankovic, the artistic duo known as Messengers of the Sun. The work activates the interrupted memories of the “lost towns”, communities displaced by the construction of the Panama Canal and the creation of the Canal Zone — a US-administered colonial enclave that, for nearly a century, imposed new territorial orders, restricted freedoms, enforced segregation, and reshaped everyday life.

At the centre of the installation hangs a seven-metre-long suspended hammock hand-woven with indigo-dyed fabric. Rooted in Indigenous traditions across the Americas and later embedded in the domestic culture of Caribbean workers who migrated to Panama, the hammock embodies rest, protection, mobility, and home. It gathers layered Indigenous, Afro-Caribbean, and Panamanian histories of displacement, survival, and adaptation.

Indigo blue envelops the space, connecting intimacy and landscape, refuge and extraction. Historically associated with colonial economies and forced labour, the pigment becomes a bearer of memory.

A spatialised sound environment merges water, machinery, human voices, and Caribbean rhythms, activating the pavilion as a sensorial field of resonance.