Welcome to Mining Life
A PhD thesis in Artistic Research by Oscar Lara

This thesis invites you into a journey—one grounded in practice, collaboration, and critical reflection. It unfolds in the form of a website and is structured in two interconnected parts. The first contains the three Acts that shape the core of the research: Within Heritage Movements, Searching for Power on the Collective Laugh, and Preventive Custody. The second part is an appendix, offering behind-the-scenes materials that reflect the complexity of these Acts: working notes, visual fragments, personal reflections, field reports, and the voices of collaborators in different formats. Together, they aim to create bridges between the situatedness of the contexts and the methodologies tested.

Each Act took place in multiple geographies—Sweden and Peru—and unfolded across extended timeframes.
Act 1: Within Heritage Movements operated in Lima and various locations in Sweden from 2016 onward, although its roots trace back to 2013.
Act 2: Searching for Power on the Collective Laugh was active between 2017 and 2020, in Lima, Madre de Dios, and Stockholm.
Act 3: Preventive Custody was developed between 2021 and 2024 in Madre de Dios, Stockholm, and Kopparberg.

I find it important to name these locations and periods up front, not for the sake of chronology, but to offer an entry point to the multilayered dimension that this website holds. Although presented here in past tense, each of these Acts was conceived as an ongoing endeavour—each one is alive in its own way.

The choice of a website format for this PhD thesis is not merely aesthetic or practical. It reflects a core concern of the research: how to use the tools and platforms of the artistic field in ways that resist academic exclusivity and open space for broader circulation, access, and use.

As I told Johanna Tysk back in 2015:

“I believe we [artists] need to show greater responsibility toward the real structural change our projects claim to aim for—but often fail to achieve. […] Could [those involved] be empowered in some way—by our work, by who we are, or through our networks?”
—Interview with Johanna Tysk

This PhD was born out of that concern—a desire to challenge inherited frameworks within socially engaged art and to test alternative configurations. The intention has never been to simply produce artistic output, but to reflect on how artistic processes might operate as decolonial and collaborative strategies within contexts of power imbalance.

From the beginning, a set of questions shaped this research—not as abstract hypotheses, but as urgent tensions felt within practice:

Can socially engaged art generate real structural change—without being co-opted by institutions or instrumentalised for cultural capital?
Can we move beyond extractive or “participatory” models, toward something that truly shifts power?
Can we build formats that are fast enough to intervene meaningfully, but deep enough to last?

These questions were not theoretical—they were personal, ethical, and methodological. And they ignited doubt, form and more important they sparked action within me.

Back in 2015, I also said:

“I’ve come to realise that, in most cases, when an artist works with a human group in need, it is the field of art—as well as the artist’s career—that benefits from the encounter, while the people in crisis are often left unchanged. I find this very problematic.”
—Interview with Johanna Tysk​

That tension is one of the driving forces behind Mining Life. Throughout the Acts, I have tested ways of redistributing authorship, of rethinking the artist’s role not as a producer of meaning but as a facilitator of collective processes, and of negotiating the ethics of representation within artistic research. These strategies are not always successful or comfortable, but the messiness is part of the methodology.

As you navigate this website, you may notice that the structure reflects the spirit of the work: layered, open-ended, situated, and experimental. The intention is not to deliver conclusions but to open possibilities—for dialogue, for transfer, and for re-use in other contexts.

This is a thesis that holds questions more than answers. It emerged from doubt, from friction, and from a desire to test the field of artistic research as a space where something meaningful can happen—not just for the sake of art, but for those whose lives it touches.

Welcome to Mining Life.