Giana

De Dier

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Giana De Dier

Giana De Dier's collages center around Afro-Caribbean women who migrated to Panama during the Canal's construction. Layering archival photos, family documents, and found imagery, she reimagines what the record left out, treating collage as a way of remembering, storytelling, and building worlds that resist erasure.

In the Words of the Artist

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I currently describe my practice as a process of archiving possibilities. My practice is informed by the stories I heard while growing up about my maternal great-grandmother who migrated from Barbados to Panama in the early 1900s during the construction of the Canal. With my work, I aim to depict Afro-Caribbean women found in photographic archives as main characters of their own stories while also showing the varied experiences and complexities of how they lived and the interactions they had on the isthmus.

The work is not documentation of events, but an opportunity to question what is present and what is missing from the archives. It is also an opportunity to think about how that information shapes how we see and what we choose or are forced to ignore.

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The main materials I use in my collages are from my family archive. These materials include personal documents, birth certificates, notes, letters, receipts, recipes, and photos that my grandmother and grand aunts saved over the years. The rest of the elements I source online, and there are images I save for years before adding them to a piece. There’s a language within the process. It is not something that I have decoded, but I am aware of it while I work.

Between the fragments I decide to use for each piece, the color palette of the work, the composition, and how the finished collage communicates something to me—that’s how I know things belong. There is a feeling I’m aiming for, a balance in the elements that I'm constantly searching for. Once I see I've achieved it, the work is done.

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What we choose not to see is not a question, but a statement. I’m thinking of all the times Black women were and are ignored as a choice, being on purpose in a way. The work is presenting Afro-Caribbean women who masqueraded as men, who blended in and worked in Canal construction sites after losing their husbands or partners. They did this to get paid more than they would be doing different jobs around the Canal Zone.

I hope these women are finally seen, and people ask themselves what else they have been ignoring in archives. I hope people question themselves and go through a process of unlearning as well. When I cut into existing documents, I'm pulling something out, uncovering information that’s hidden between the lines.

For this portrait series, I’m adding the female gaze; men took the original archival images. I’m shifting the gaze not only by framing the collages as being “photographed” by a Black woman but intentionally building each space as a safe, lived-in representation of each person in the frame.

The title Recuperar y reconstruir la identidad como ejercicio de resistencia (recover and rebuild identity as an exercise in resistance) today is a reminder of the power there is in image-making, self-representation, and the power in telling our own stories. To me, that’s important in the work.

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About the Artist

Giana De Dier is a contemporary collage artist whose work centers the experiences and heritage of Afro-Caribbean people who migrated to Panama during the construction of the Panama Canal in the early 1900s. Her art places particular emphasis on the experiences of Afro-Caribbean women, highlighting the ways they navigated and occupied space, formed relationships, and built communities. In her collages, De Dier combines layers of paper, fabric, personal and archival records, and photographs to ignite conversations on memory, migration, family history, identity, and representation.

Her collages re-envision and explore the possibilities of what might be absent from photographic and historical archives. Her work challenges the erasure and misrepresentation of Afro-Caribbean women in historical narratives, offering alternative perspectives that honor their contributions and histories. De Dier studied visual arts at the University of Panama.

Her collages have been exhibited at the Art Gallery of the IDB Employees Association, Washington; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Panama; the 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, PA; the Panama Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale; the Museum of Modern Art of Medellín, Colombia; the Remai Modern, Saskatoon; the National Portrait Gallery, UK; and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. She has participated in art residencies at the Panama Canal Museum and the Delfina Foundation in London.

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