What Every Life Dreams

What Every Life Dreams is an exhibition project made up of various interventions and artistic actions created specifically for Ciudad de las Artes and its surroundings, as part of Pinta Panamá. Invited to reflect on this context, a group of Panamanian artists and creators engage in dialogues with the spatial, urban, and environmental characteristics of Ciudad de las Artes and Panama as a whole, as well as with the local artistic scene. These are reflections on inhabiting, living, and existing in today’s Panama. While each project is autonomous, they emerge from shared reflections on the opportunities and challenges offered by this context.

With a single live performance, La vida que nos dieron (2025) is a dance piece by Enlaces, the program of Fundación Espacio Creativo, adapted specifically for this occasion. In it, the bodies of a group of young people from the Santa Ana neighborhood trace a choreography that expresses their desire to live, dream, celebrate, and claim a future—despite everyday hardships. The piece is performed live on the day of the opening and serves as the starting point for a sound installation that reproduces the sounds of the dancers’ bodies in motion, created by Felipe Gómez and Jonathan Harker in collaboration with Carlos Urriola and Iñaki Iriberri.

The sounds, recorded during rehearsals, generate a ghostly presence in the space—an echo of the bodies that recently inhabited it. The audio, titled El espacio que nos dieron (2025), is part of the proposal developed by Gómez and Harker together with musicians Carlos Urriola and Iñaki Iriberri. The piece is complemented by Los que mudan piel (2025), a series of altered canvases hanging from the ceiling, where a face morphs, appears, and disappears in the air; and by La tinta no secó (2025), a sculpture that simulates a drop of ink suspended above a set of printing machines that are part of the Ciudad de las Artes space.

Meanwhile, Libertad Rojo presents Poetic Protocols for Walking (2025), a self-guided dérive for visiting the Metropolitan Natural Park, the immediate surroundings of Ciudad de las Artes. A small publication available for visitors includes exercises for acting upon the environment and transforming the space into an object of play and exploration. In the park, a large-scale fanzine gathers drawings and words from visitors who share personal walks, forming a collective collage or expanded field journal.

Finally, Ciudadanos del arte, also presented on the day of the opening, is a performance by artist and educator Humberto Vélez, featuring the participation of students and faculty from the Narciso Garay National Institute of Music, the National Schools of Dance and Visual Arts, and the National Directorate of Artistic Education of the Ministry of Culture—all based at Ciudad de las Artes. The performance reflects on the relationship between art, education, and Panamanian citizenship through a “symphony in action.”

Proposing different ways of reading and responding to the surroundings of Ciudad de las Artes, Panama City, and the country at large, What Every Life Dreams is an exercise in interpretation and reaction to the particularities of this city and its natural, social, and artistic ecosystem. The projects offer poetic approaches to the realities of the country, while also pointing to critical issues and current concerns. At the same time, they propose artistic intervention, movement, observation, and dialogue with the environment as strategies for living and dreaming in the place we find ourselves.