Giana De Dier (b. 1980 in Panama City; lives and works in Panama City) creates collages centered on Afro-Caribbean migrants in early-1900s Panama who worked in the Canal Zone, a 10-mile stretch of land walled off and governed by the United States from 1903 to 1979. For the 58th Carnegie International, the artist presents her newly commissioned series what we choose not to see, based on stories of women who dressed as men in order to find more lucrative work constructing the canal. In this series, De Dier addresses the motivations and perspectives of the women who traveled to Panama, a subject that remains under-documented and largely recorded in secondhand accounts. Through collage, the artist pieces together this history while preserving these documentary gaps, fragmenting and recombining existing archival photographs into scenes and events otherwise left without image. The artist works with photographs taken primarily by European men who misrepresented their subjects, rarely included their names, and often labeled them by racial category. The legacy of these colonial power dynamics is preserved by institutional archives that limit how these images can circulate or be publicly accessed. De Dier bypasses these barriers and reappropriates these images, using them to support the narratives of those depicted to create counter-histories of erasure.
