When I was three or four years old, I was obsessed with making the ocean less salty, so I would grab sugar packets wherever I could find them and spill them whenever we went to the beach. Clearly, my efforts didn’t yield any results. It has taken me a long time to understand that we must start small to really change things. We know that 80 percent of brain development occurs in the first three years of life and that if you don’t read to a child before the age of five, everything you do will be fixing problems that didn’t need to be there in the first place. That’s why we are starting with babies and their families from age zero. Since teenage pregnancy is such a big issue in our society, teenage moms and their babies are one of the populations we intend to work with closely. In addition, children who live in homes with at least twenty books get three more years of schooling, on average, than children from homes without books, regardless of their parents’ education, occupation, and social class. That’s why part of our plan includes a network of home libraries, so that the families enrolled in our program can get twenty age-appropriate books for their children per year to start their home libraries. The habit of reading develops from doing it everyday at home, so while there will be many activities at the library to engage children of different age groups and provide support for their success at school and in life, we know that it is imperative that we make the parents our partners in this effort. Parent involvement is the number one predictor of early literacy success.

We recently had a beautiful show called Hasta Aqui Era Agua: Fotografías en diálogo con historias de Santa Ana (The Water Came Up To Here: Photographs in Dialogue with Stories from Santa Ana) which brought together the self-portraits of five international artists (Ana Mendieta, Zanele Muholi, Francesca Woodman, Aneta Grzeszykowska and Katalin Ladik) with testimonies in various creative formats by women from the neighborhood of Santa Ana (Nelly Vera, Xiomara Da Silva, Gineth Camargo and Raysa Ramirez). Curated and facilitated by Tova Katzman and Daniel Molina, the exhibition presented a dialogue around the transformation of the body and territory. We started out by talking with the four women from the community about their concerns, since that is often where artists’ works originate,and it’s something wecan relate to. The process was special, full of introspection, and the pieces the women created were deep, powerful, and honest.

The day before the opening, Nelly, a refugee from Colombia who had felt deeply touched by Ana Mendieta’s work, had a video call with her mother and siblings in Cali. She showed them her piece: a picture of her mother covered in the Colombian flag, next to a poem entitled “Matria,” about her longing to return to Colombia and hug her mother. I could not contain my tears. It was  truly special to witness that moment. Nelly later told us that the process of the exhibition had not only allowed her to connect with her family in a different way, in spite of the distance, but that it had tapped into her love of writing, something she had stopped doing years ago. She recently started working on a novel.

I am still, three years after the fact, insanely proud of Casa Santa Ana’s first publication, Sandra Eleta: The Invisible World (2018, copublished with Editorial RM). Eleta is one of Panama’s most important photographers and an inspiration for her incredible work with communities, especially in Portobelo, the fishing village on the Caribbean coast of Panama where she has lived since the 1970s. Sitting with Sandra and listening to the stories behind the photographs was a privilege. We took it as our responsibility to make her work and life be better known in the world. The process included digitizing the negatives; researching the actual dates of the pictures, since Sandra had never really cared about dates; and encouraging Sandra to write her own memoirs of life in Portobelo. It even resulted in the reconnection between Sandra and her dear friend, photographer Graciela Iturbide (whose work I loved since my Mexico years). Iturbide ended up also participating in the book. We launched the book at Paris Photo and it is being sold in eighteen countries around the world. The whole experience was magical but I mainly cherish the team of women (Mónica Kupfer, Paula Kupfer, Rose Marie Cromwell) that worked together in this book, which gave the project an even more powerful energy.

Around the time that we were working on the book, we also had an eight-week photography workshop with children, in which they photographed their neighborhoods and the people who were important to them. They all met with Sandra and the encounter was remarkable for its horizontality and the absence of any sense of hierarchy. They showed her their pictures and she showed them hers, a conversation between photographers.

As any non-profit might tell you, sustainability is key in order to continue doing our work. Both Casa Santa Ana and Multiplo Editions were founded by Johnny Roux, and through him, German painter André Butzer heard about us and the work that we do. We are incredibly fortunate that Butzer was so generous with his donation of this print, the proceeds of which will directly benefit our library project. We are always looking for creative, collaborative ways of funding our projects in a sustainable manner, and look forward to many more collaborations.

We are working on the first book-length publication on Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker’s longstanding collaboration as video artists. The book will offer an overview of their work, an extended interview between the artists and curator and art critic Sandino Scheidegger, and a contextual essay by art historian Paula Kupfer that considers their videos through the prism of the historical, cultural, and ecological laboratory that is Panama City. It’s an honor to work and learn from brilliant people on Casa Santa Ana’s different projects. Working collaboratively is a fundamental aspect of our organization. Other exciting things are in development. Stay tuned!

Paula V. Kupfer is a Panamanian-German art historian and writer specialized in the history of photography and modern art in Latin America. She is a frequent collaborator of Casa Santa Ana.