Paula V. Kupfer

“Reparative Interventions” investigates how historical images, visual culture, and contemporary art have shaped the memory of the Panama Canal and US Canal Zone. The project critically examines visual records of the Canal project, including vernacular objects such as postcards, revealing photography’s role as a persuasive agent of US empire in Latin America. It places these visual records into dialogue with the work of contemporary artists, foregrounding the ways they have reoriented photographs from tools of imperial domination into mediums of reckoning that enact harm reduction and communal care. The project spans the length of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, starting with canal construction and the occupation of the Canal Zone from 1904 onwards, and culminating with the aftermath of US withdrawal at the end of 1999. Since then, a growing number of artists have challenged inherited interpretations of Panamanian history, bringing overlooked political, environmental, and racial aspects into public view and enacting gestures of healing and repair across the territory.