Panama City, the initial stage of the project, is the most populated city in Central America (4303 inhabitants / km² according to the last census), described by many businessmen and/or exporters as the "Dubai of the Americas", it has an intense financial activity and a huge banking center constituted mainly by private banking, which, during the last two decades of the  Twentieth century  has been strengthened as one of the most important financial centers of  Latin America.

This, added to its building development, the presence of large international hotel chains and marked American influence in certain areas Panama is also known as  "The Miami of Central America".

In this way, the Panamanian capital is conceived as a space for business, investment and transaction, home to large companies that lay their foundations there, and gigantic buildings that display a large army of semi-uniformed office workers that walk through the streets accodring to the rhythm of the 8-hour labour hours.  

The public space, scenery of transit and habitat of the citizenship is conceived by this as a hostile space, without movement, abstracted from its possible enjoyment or leisure of the one who turns it into a city. Living from one point to another subordinate to the urban order tax and on which it has to "fight" without to find a common space.  

The Fonda, city and future (2021) project consists on a series of interventions that reconsider our interactions with existing structures in the urban context. From fiction, satire, and humor, the project proposes the design and reinterpretation of four types of furniture that seek to respond to the need to generate experience from the public space; which are accompanied by texts that generate the possibility of a narrative and story for each of the four drawings, making the viewer imagine / relate / speculate about the furniture and its possible interactions with it and with public space.   

The name Fonda makes a direct reference to the “fonda” in the Panamanian context (a trail left by a street vendor on the sidewalk), since this is a kind of self-managed urbanism that reactivates certain spaces in the city with a service. The 4 furnishings conceived to consider our needs: sometimes ridiculous, but real, the project proposes other types of experiences that we could have as inhabitants of a Latin American city and it pushes us to want to be participants in the revitalization of our surroundings from a daily urban planning approach.

During August 2021, within the framework of the Tramo project, a traveling space for collective exhibition from the public space created by the curator and artist Mana Pinto (Panama, 1995);  Fonda, city and future , proposed throughout that month a series of drifts and walks with the collaboration of a Panamanian architects and urban planners collective, Pulmón del barrio; Who, hand in hand with me and in accordance with the guidelines of the work proposed for this second edition of Tramo, a series of drifts, meetings and interventions the city of Panama.  

During the 4 encounters that Fonda, city and future had and through the drifts/walks we had, a series of places were intervened where potentially some of the 4  proposed furniture by the project could be placed; pasting a series of posters belonging to each of the furniture in the public space.  

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Photography by Val Schnack  

Special thanks: Mana Pinto, Val Schnack, Cristina Preciado, Gabo GdeP and Claudia Peréz.