This documentary is based on research-based fieldwork (Dec 2022-Jan 2023) where seven Panamanian families of West Indian descent (Jamaica, Martinica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Guyana) between Pana City and Colon, who agreed to meet and share their family memories about being migrant workers who, in the XIX century, built the Panama Canal.

With a dedication to Tina Campt's (2017) book with the same title as this project, I invite, as the author does, to metaphorically “listen” to family archives and photography of that specific historical time. It wishes to challenge the archives' classic visual and bidimensional repository meaning, creating plural sensory registers to represent his- and her-stories guarded in memories of private family albums. Most of West Indian descent families have lost their family photos due to post-Canal construction transnational migrations, the USA occupation- war in Panama, and the forced displacements from the Area Repartida the families faced. This poetic documentary develops the synesthetic and emotional memories they keep. It works poetically on the absence of material culture, such as the disappearance of photographs, the sense of loss, death, and pain, but also the joy the family members “listened” to when connecting with those absences.