Ana Elena Tejera
House Type 104 - Installation - 2021
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 23
Installation
House Type 104 was found abandoned – a broken chair, an armchair lying abandoned on the ground, bits of wood. The house was located close to the frontier of the Panama Canal zone, an enclosure separating the Americans from the Panamians. Despite its position on the edge of a tropical jungle, the house was built in mahogany from a forest in the US and its name, “Type 104,” was used by the Canal company for the housing it built for its employees. A family – a soldier, a woman, three children and two dogs – lived in this house. The military took it over and a few years later it was shelled by the opposite side. A big battle. Since then, the house has stood abandoned. Neighbours thought it was dead, but despite its wounds, it can still breathe. The interactive performance is a sequence shot of the interior of this house in Panama, with a sound track in which we hear the voices of its memories, its ghosts, percussion inducing trance, the salsa songs that played on the radio, the steps of the army in the distance. Then comes a human body, feet turning and hands trying to fly, and it offers a ritual to the mineral, dancing again and again until the wound reopens.
Ana Elena Tejera
Ana Elena Tejera is a multidisciplinary artist from Panama who works with film and performance. She created the Festival de la Memoria, a performance-cum-installation, around the urban spaces of Panama, and has contributed to the restoration of the Panamian film library at the Filmoteca de Catalunya. Panquiaco, her first feature film, was presented at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and her latest short, A Love Song in Spanish, was in the official competition at the Berlinale and at MoMA.
