Giana De Dier

In Todo lo que es noble y verdadero (2024), Giana De Dier interweaves archival imagery, family photographs, and lush banana leaves to reconstruct the fragmented memories of Afro-Caribbean migration to Panama during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Throughout the polyptych, the banana appears as far more than a botanical or tropical motif: it becomes a silent witness to the human displacements driven by Caribbean and Central American extractive economies. Its vivid green leaves emerge between portraits, official documents, and scenes of agricultural labor, linking the migrant body to plantation systems and landscapes shaped by colonialism and transnational capital.

The monumental female figures anchoring the compositions seem to contain within their bodies the dispersed histories of entire generations. Through layered collage, De Dier juxtaposes scenes of everyday life, plantations, family portraits, and cultivated terrain, evoking how memory persists physically and emotionally beyond institutional archives. The banana thus operates simultaneously as a marker of rootedness and uprootedness: a symbol of labor, survival, and forced mobility, but also of cultural transmission and collective resilience.

By inserting vibrant vegetal imagery into a visual universe largely composed of black-and-white historical photographs, De Dier creates a tension between past and present, archive and living experience. The work questions which histories remain visible within national narratives and which survive only through intimate, familial, or oral memory. In this context, the banana becomes a surface upon which histories of migration, racialization, territory, and Afro-Caribbean inheritance in Panama continue to be inscribed.