A collage-based artistic creation workshop countered the dynamics and effects of imprisonment
Originally published on Global Voices
Collage by T, L, Y, P & C, participants in the workshop ‘Life Narratives through Collage’ (PUCP), held in a prison in Lima. Collage courtesy of the authors.
By Adriana Hildenbrand and Lucia Bracco
In recent years, there has been growing support for tough-on-crime rhetoric. In Peru, for example, in 2025, there was a shift in the representation of prisons driven by the government. The visibility of social reintegration projects decreased, and the focus shifted towards intensifying restrictions and constantly exposing control mechanisms towards prisoners and those who maintain links with them through visits.
While dominant media coverage focuses on prison management policies that dehumanise prisoners, alternative initiatives have existed for years, opening up spaces for expression for incarcerated people. These initiatives come from different fronts: from staff on the ground, who, knowing the day-to-day reality, guide their work proposals by internal dynamics rather than top-down institutional guidelines; from the experiences of prisoners themselves, who seek to create positive or at least more bearable spaces during their period of incarceration, and from external organizations committed to the rights of prisoners, among others.
In a women’s prison in Lima, Peru, in 2024–2025, the dynamics developed through a collage-based artistic creation workshop revealed how a group of incarcerated women counter the dynamics and effects of imprisonment through individual reflection, creative practice, and the sustaining of collective bonds.
Experiences of suffering during imprisonment are often silenced for various reasons: lack of people willing to listen, concern about overburdening those close to them who are willing to accompany them, fear of institutional punishment, among others. Faced with this, prisoners seek other forms of expression and resistance to punishment on top of punishment. In the case of the workshop, the women adopted collage as a technique that allows them to express themselves beyond words and thus, appeal to the audience’s disposition to receive their messages through feeling.
So many eyes watching us. What are they looking at?
P and C attend the workshop every Friday, punctual and well-groomed. At the beginning of the workshop, they came from the same prison block, but after a few weeks, the prison carried out an evaluation and, while P progressed to a lower security block, C remained in the maximum security block, where, week after week, control measures were intensified. The two-hour art workshop became one of the few spaces where they could meet once a week. In one session, as they create their collage of gazes together, they comment on the pressure of gazes as an exercise in control.
Collage by C & P, participants in the workshop ‘Life Narratives through Collage’ (PUCP), held in a prison in Lima. Collage courtesy of the authors.
But the gazes chasing them did not control their dangerousness within the establishment, nor their process of resocialization for a return to society without the risk of returning to prison. The institutional slogans that validate the existence of prisons and constant surveillance do not appear in her collage. The focus of control was female sexuality, especially homoerotic sexuality.
Collage by C & P, participants in the workshop ‘Life Narratives through Collage’ (PUCP), held in a prison in Lima. Collage courtesy of the authors.
P and C met in prison and have been a couple for several years. They are a couple who coordinate their outfits on special occasions, give each other handmade gifts, and dream of starting a family when they regain their freedom. They are a couple who feel that the stares from prison staff and other women can be so intense that they make them feel sick. “They stare at you. You stay calm, and they stare at you here. You’re not allowed to be happy.”
My universe is more than this
Collage by L, participant in the workshop ‘Life Narratives through Collage’ (PUCP), held in a prison in Lima. Collage courtesy of the authors.
T is a young woman who started the art workshop a few weeks after being confined. Initially, her collages were filled with wild animals on the prowl. As T chose the figures to represent her story in a collage, L guided her in how to survive imprisonment: don't fall in love with someone who doesn't love you back; if you need clothes appropriate to your gender identity, you must submit a formal request so that they are not confiscated from your family at the entrance; don't think too much; don't trust easily.
L had daughters the same age as T. She had been imprisoned several times and knew how important it was to have information and ears willing to listen in order to cope emotionally with the first few months of confinement. She also knew that, in order to survive, it was essential to take a leap: to move from those first moments when the pain of imprisonment clouds one's vision and prevents one from seeing beyond, to a second stage, where prison is recognised as part of a broader story, the label of “criminal” as one layer in a much more complex identity, and where ties to the outside world do not end with imprisonment.
Collage by L, participant in the workshop ‘Life Narratives through Collage’ (PUCP), held in a prison in Lima. Collage courtesy of the authors.
While searching for and finding images for their collages, T and L shared memories of their lives before prison, their current feelings, and their fears about the future. They found words for what, in the everyday life of the wing, a monotonous, repetitive space, found no way to be expressed.
Overflow as a tool for expression
Hypercontrol of the body, movement, and interpersonal relationships between those inside and outside the prison is a well-known punishment strategy. Nations that have been proudly displaying their fight against crime in recent years have been exploiting this to showcase their work.
As part of the collage workshop introduction, various collages were shown as examples of artistic production. Z picked up an image of a woman’s head from which many elements emerged: ‘This is how we all feel here, unable to stop thinking about a thousand things at once.’ Meanwhile, K chose a collage that included a rock and said, “Prison has made me a tough person. I find it hard to express myself. Art will help us express what cannot be put into words.”
There is a central aspect of female incarceration in overcrowded and chaotic prisons, such as most Peruvian prisons: despite how overwhelming the experience may be, despite the intensity of control and punishment, incarcerated women often preserve mental space for many other concerns. Between memories of pasts marked by stories of suffering and uncertain futures, there are presents laden with responsibilities of care, of children, of mothers, of relationships with partners outside, which deteriorate with distance and are difficult to maintain.
In the workshop, collages often show the multiplicity of dimensions of life and the lives of significant people who occupy every corner of incarcerated women’s minds. Represented in overloaded collages that do not accept the limits of the chosen surface, they extend beyond the margins of the paper like someone searching for breathing space in the midst of an overcrowded prison, suffocating and constantly bombarded with visual and auditory stimuli.
Collage by F, participant in the workshop ‘Life Narratives through Collage’ (PUCP), held in a prison in Lima. Collage courtesy of the authors.
Thus, the aesthetics of excess developed by the women in the workshop, with overlaps and jumps between themes, spaces and times, serves as a means of representing the overwhelming nature of confinement, as well as the ways in which incarcerated women’s thinking connects what prison isolation seeks to pigeonhole and keep apart: the woman of today from her past, the imprisoned woman from her significant others, the woman with initiative from her projects and ambitions.
Joining the voices of incarcerated women
The experiences of K, Z, P and C, T, and L, along with 20 other women, invite us to recognize that the increase in forms and intensities of punishment is not necessarily aimed at reducing crime. On the contrary, it focuses on weakening spaces of potential well-being, such as the experience and expression of sexualities, the integration of different layers of identity, and resistance to sources of suffering.
As long as there are interlocutors willing to connect, women deprived of their liberty will continue to find ways to express how the control over their bodies, minds and identities exercised in prisons oppresses them through social mandates rather than through planning focused on building a life in society.
The authors thank their team — Luisa Pariachi, Camila Rodrigo, and Giovana Fernádez — as well as the women who participated in the workshop, for their valuable commitment.