Collaging prisons: re-imagining art and confinement spaces

This article deepens the analysis of art production within penal contexts from a feminist decolonial perspective, centring on the project 'Women's Symbolic Prisons and Agencies' in Lima, Peru. This initiative engages incarcerated women in exploring the fluid boundaries between symbolic and material prisons, resistance, and agency through individual and collective collages. The article can be read in two ways: through its text or its images, offering a dual approach that expands reflections on prison art as both theory and methodology. We analyse three key themes: (1) the intermingled representation of femininity, confinement and freedom; (2) collage as silent solidarity and individual expression; and (3) tunnels and relational dynamics between 'inside' and 'outside'. While prison art is embedded within carceral control, it also serves as a site of personal and collective resistance, broadening connections between the imprisoned and the outside world. By creating new ways of knowledge production, it challenges dominant perceptions of prisoners and imprisonment.