This project brings together researchers from Peru and Turkey to explore how women define and experience confinement, freedom, and femininity in two settings: prison and university.

Through collage, we seek to understand how concrete and symbolic «prisons» operate in the Global South and, within them, how women exercise agency, resistance, and imagination.

Shared Context

Peru and Turkey, while having distinct histories, share structural dynamics of domination that have profoundly shaped women’s lives in both territories.

LIMA, PERU · PRISON

Colonial-Patriarchal Heritage

The legacy of the Spanish Empire established a hierarchical social order that continues to reproduce itself through structural inequalities.

DERSIM, TURKEY · UNIVERSITY

Modernization and Symbolic Exclusion

The modernization process, strongly influenced by nationalism, reinforced a restricted vision of national identity that has historically excluded various ethnic groups, particularly the Kurds.

Prison and university can be seen as antagonistic institutions. However, in both contexts, dominant discourses have historically been used to «civilize» and «educate» women, often through religious mandates — Catholicism in Peru and Sunni Islam in Turkey — that reinforce traditional gender roles and forms of symbolic punishment, subtle or otherwise.

Methodology

Collage allows for creation from scarcity without requiring technical skills, combining disparate elements and activating a reflective process.

LIMA, PERU

Chorrillos Annex

Location: Chorrillos Women's Annex Penitentiary Facility, maximum-security prison.
Duration: 11 sessions between May and November 2024.
Participants: 10 women deprived of liberty.

DERSIM, TURKEY

Munzur University

Location: Munzur University, Dersim, Turkey. Most students come from eastern Turkey.
Duration: 4 sessions between October and December 2024, preceded by preliminary interviews in July 2024.
Participants: 15 Sociology and Art students.

Galleries

Collages - Peru

REVIEW

"Sharing Silences / Reassembling / Revealing the Hidden" is a collective exhibition by 10 women deprived of liberty: Ash, Ale, Barbie, Sarahi, Leyla, Mafer, Gabriela, Yetzabeth, Michell, and Andrea. Each collage tells a distinct story in its own right; together, the installation invites us to read the set as a shared story in which freedom, confinement, and womanhood intertwine.

Collages - Turkey

REVIEW

The process began with questions such as: "What do restriction and punishment mean in your daily life?" and "How is freedom experienced from the perspective of being a woman?"

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