The installation Preventive Custody is based on memories and stories from the region Madre de Dios in the Peruvian Amazon, told by six women whose lives have become caught up in the exploitative network of prostitution and human trafficking connected to the goldmining in the area. Erika Lima Mamani, Fortunata Panihuara Cordova, Karla Toscano Requena, Corina Lozano Tuanama, Mayra Basos Garcia and Catalina Pinedo Valles—all of whom have been trafficked to Madre de Dios from different parts of Peru—were invited by Oscar Lara to write a script for a theatre play to be performed in Europe by Swedish actors. In collaboration with the Theatre of the Oppressed-practitioner Ricardo Galvez, author and researcher Gabriel Arriarán, the script writer and dramaturg Eva Maria Dahlin and scenographer Johanna Mårtensson, they wrote a play about pain, death and loss, but also about love, hope and motherhood.

At Tensta Konsthall, the play is staged as an audio installation inside a sculptural scenography. The original script was written by the six women in Madre de Dios together with Eva-Maria Dahlin. In the summer of 2023, they traveled to Ställbergs Gruva in Sweden to work on the script with Lara’s team and five Swedish actors who all have a background in Latin America. The final audio installation combines recordings from the Amazon, Ställberg and Tensta.

In weaving together these different places and voices, the women’s stories are heard outside their immediate environment in the Peruvian jungle and put in contact with other contexts of mining and migration.

The scenography was developed by Johanna Mårtensson in dialogue with the six women. In the stage set, their individual houses and memories from before they were trafficked are brought together to form a micro-community. It also includes the bar where they work in Madre de Dios and the prison where three of them were unfairly incarcerated. Mirroring the way human memory functions, certain spaces and objects are rendered in great detail whilst others are more rudimentary or missing altogether. More poetic than documentary, this interplay between clarity, loss and fragmentation also defines the audio component, where the sound of a small motorboat crossing the Amazon river becomes an equally important carrier of the women’s stories as the spoken narrative.

Project initiation and development: Oscar Lara

Original script: Erika Lima Mamani, Fortunata Panihuara Cordova, Karla Toscano Requena, Corina Lozano Tuanama, Mayra Basos Garcia and Catalina Pinedo Valles in collaboration with script writer and dramaturg Eva-Maria Dahlin. Adapted for audio installation by Oscar Lara.

Scenography: Johanna Mårtensson

Audio design: Oscar Lara and Daniel M. Karlsson

Carpentry (scenography): Roger Sjögren

Actors: Pascalle Arias, Natalia Fuentes, Monica Albornoz, Annika Whittenbury, Wayra Monasterio.

Assistants: Nicole Renard, Christine Dahl Helweg-Larsen

Produced with support from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Kulturrådet, the Embassy of Peru in Sweden and Konstnärsnamden.