El Proyecto COVACHA se presentó a fines del año 2021 en el Complejo Penitenciario donde se desarrolló y luego en el Centro de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Mayo 2022), en galería Arte x Arte en el marco del FELIFA, Festival de Libros de Fotografía (Capital Federal. Argentina. Abril 2022), en la Casa de las Culturas (Resistencia, Chaco, 2022), en la Feria del libro de Berazategui (Bs As 2022), entre otros.

“How do you resist in the jaws of prison power? This book is an expression of the infinite forms of resistance to the structural and dehumanising violence that reigns behind bars. The bet of this educational and artistic process was to place at its centre a politics of links and, as always happens with pedagogies that liberate, to open up a transformative space. In their play of light and shadows, the suggestive images constructed by these female prisoners propose a reflection that transcends the confinement to propose to think about the logics of increasingly exclusionary societies”. 

Back cover text
Ana Cacopardo
Journalist and documentary filmmaker. Feminist and human rights activist

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“Becoming a school in the Freirean pedagogical praxis of "possible dreams" is the path of our school, School No. 702, which operates in Women's Prison Units 8 and 33 in Los Hornos, province of Buenos Aires. Our students are young women, young adults and adults, whose brief and forgotten schooling trajectories have been traced by the structural poverty of their original environments. Most of them were born into insecure families: with little affection and precarious jobs; victims of gender violence at home, in the street; transformed early on by motherhood, not always desired. The path of inequalities they follow finally throws them into the exclusion of confinement. They arrive with broken dreams. In the daily work of the classrooms, we look for hospitable learning alternatives, from which they feel strengthened to rebuild their dreams, their desires and can take on the challenge of starting over. 

This project was born from this search in 2015. Vital practice from which, year after year, each student managed to find the history that constitutes her, made up of her own and inherited stories. This experience allowed them to rediscover their faces, their bodies, in the midst of an everyday life without mirrors, and to discover how to stop the instant of recognising themselves in a photograph”.

Opening text

Lic. Susana Canavesi

Teacher School Nº 702. Unit 8.

The team that took part in the work process is made up of the following people:
Jerónimo Rivero (La Plata; 1975) Photographer, Journalist and Professor of Social Communication UNLP Idea, General Production and Photography
Juan Manuel Fiuza (La Plata; 1978) Visual Artist, Photographer, Designer and Visual Communicator Edition, Design and Layout
Nicolás Janowski (City of Buenos Aires; 1980) Photographer, Editor and Anthropologist UAB (Barcelona, Spain) Graphic Consulting and Edition
Pablo Rabe (La Plata, 1983) Filmmaker, Teacher and Researcher at the Faculty of Fine Arts UNLP Audiovisual Production
Juan Manuel Zaldúa (Neuquén, 1990) Filmmaker and Professor in Audiovisual Arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts UNLP Workshop teacher
Célica Véliz (Ezeiza, 1983) Photographer and Professor of Visual Arts IPAT (Tandil, Arg) Workshop teacher
Yenifer Galindo (Manizales, 1987) Social Worker. University of Caldas (Colombia) Project Management
Susana Canavesi (La Plata, 1967) Bachelor of Education Sciences UNLP Inaugural text and teacher at School Nº 702 in Unit 8 of Los Hornos. Text production:
Ana Cacopardo (Necochea, 1965) Journalist graduated from the UNLP and Documentary Filmmaker. Feminist and Human Rights Activist.
Liliana Cabrera (City of Buenos Aires, 1980) Editor, feminist activist and educator. Member of the collective “YoNoFui”.
Tristán Basile (La Plata, 1989) Graduate in Sociology and coordinator of the programme and university accompaniment in prisons of the Prosecretariat of Human Rights of the UNLP.
CPM Provincial Commission for Memory (Bs. As.)