Thank you very much for having followed me this far. As a way of offering a concluding element to this thesis, I kindly ask you to engage with the following video. It documents the final workshop held in Madre de Dios as part of Preventive Custody. Please watch the film before continuing to scroll down to the remainder of this final page of the thesis website.
This PhD research began with a set of tensions I could not ignore. It began with suspicion. Suspicion of my own artistic methods—how they risked aligning too easily with NGO-style structures or falling into the aestheticised trap of guerrilla provocations. Suspicion of the dynamics of authorship, of audience, and of impact.
I asked myself:
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 were the questions I carried into this journey. And through the making of Mining Life, they remained with me—not as static hypotheses, but as living forces that took new shapes across the Acts. I explored them not in theory alone, but through method, risk, and entanglement.
Acts as Answers in Motion
In Within Heritage Movements, I flipped colonial logics. I underpaid Swedish artisans to fake Peruvian heritage—highlighting the absurdities and contradictions of restitution discourse and cultural diplomacy, in response to a real diplomatic tension around looted cultural objects. It was an artistic intervention, yes—but also a systemic one. It invited the museum institution into a position of complicity, provoked diplomatic responses, and mirrored the cultural logic of restitution back onto the colonial centre. That was a kind of activism too—one rooted in structural play rather than spectacle. The project used irony, inversion, and institutional tension as its method. It was a calculated game of power and representation. I remained in control.
In Searching for Power on the Collective Laugh, that control began to slip. The project became more horizontal, and its tools—street comedy, Theatre of the Oppressed—began to speak back. I realised I could not fully anticipate what the medium would do. Street comedy was never just a communication tool; it reshaped the project from within, exposing the limits of traditional research hierarchies while offering a dynamic language of collective resistance. It taught me that impact cannot be measured solely by outcomes—it is felt in the redefinition of relationships, in the audience who stops being an observer and starts to intervene, laugh, respond. The comedians brought their own timing, their own tensions. What I thought would “reach the people” ended up reshaping me.
Then came Preventive Custody. The deepest surrender. The clearest test of trust.
When fiction was proposed, the participants pulled the process back to reality. Their choice to focus on personal experience over abstraction was not a limitation but a radical assertion of authorship. It was their refusal to become symbols. Their stories—unembellished, raw, contradictory—insisted on being heard on their own terms. That insistence reshaped my understanding of collaborative art-making and my own role within it.
There, I stepped further back. I provided access, funding, facilitation—but relinquished authorship. The scriptwriters—six women survivors of trafficking in Madre de Dios—were given full narrative control. And in the end, it was not just their stories that changed. It was all of us.
No One Can Take This Away
During the final Retablo session in Madre de Dios, something happened that no script could have planned. We began to speak from the heart.
Mayra drew a mango. Fortunata gave her own photograph. Erika made a cardboard model of our lodging. Eva Maria drew mouths and theatre curtains. Gabriel offered a sun of a new dawn. Corina prayed for us. Karla cried. Katy cried and called us family. Johanna spoke of “beautiful souls reaching Sweden.” I said: “What happened these two weeks—no one can take that from you. No one can take that from me.”
It was, perhaps, the most honest moment of the entire PhD.
In those testimonies, the early questions I asked were not answered—but they were lived. And what we lived was not artistic representation. It was transformation.
But it wasn’t all wonderful.
In the Retablo session, we touched something real, something lasting—but I must also acknowledge the complexity of what came after. Like Gabriel Arriarán said: “these two weeks showed us how we can change life.” But I also know I was in a position of power in that exchange.
My friends—Mayra, Katy, Karla, Corina, Fortunata, and Erika—went back to their lives, and I returned to mine. The workshop expresses deep gratitude from their side, but that thankfulness is shaped by how they see me—and that’s one of the hardest parts of these projects. How can I make sure the outcomes are truly theirs? How can I support them in consolidating something they can carry, something they can use to continue transforming?
In the case of the comedians from SPCL, they now own the comedy we developed together. They’ve adapted it to their many terrains, used it for their own benefit. That’s the kind of appropriation I hope for. But with Preventive Custody, it’s more fragile.
The participants didn’t walk away with a product. They walked away with an experience—an honest, transformative one where, perhaps for the first time, they felt valued for more than their bodies. Where they felt we bonded like a family. But carrying an experience is not the same as having something concrete you can use to shape your future.
I wish I could continue mediating the project, ensure that the theatrical piece happens on a full scale, that it is recognised, that its cultural power structure—placing them in the driver’s seat—can come full circle. I wish I could guarantee that they would see how these exchanges can lead to lasting benefit.
But I have to admit: I am exhausted. I also need time for myself—to enjoy my life, to build it with the help of my loved ones. That too is part of working ethically: recognising limits.
Preventive Custody is the clearest reflection of my practice—its ambitions, its tenderness, its unfinished state, and its errors. It makes visible the only way I believe these strategies can matter: through an all-or-nothing commitment, even when that comes with deep vulnerability, even when the outcome is sadness.
So, What Have I Learned?
Yes—socially engaged art can generate structural change, if the structure itself becomes the site of artistic experimentation. Mining Life proposes not artworks, but frameworks. Not outcomes, but ongoingness.
Yes—we can find methods that are both immediate and durable. Thinking tables, shared living containers, collaborative scenography, co-authored scripts—these are not metaphors. They are blueprints.
Yes—artistic research can move beyond its field, if we are willing to risk our own roles, platforms, and comfort in the process. What matters is not the artist’s gesture, but the capacity to build something that lasts beyond it.
And no—the work is not done.
Toward a Responsible Future
Although this website presents a multilayered, thoroughly documented thesis—offering its methods, theoretical frameworks, and conclusions across text, image, and film, among the various formats—this PhD should not be understood as a fixed product. It is a constellation of processes that will continue to unfold, because they belong not only to me.
The collaborators, the stories, the structures—they all demand care beyond the research timeline. The women of Preventive Custody are still carrying their stories. The Paracas replicas still construct meaning. The comedians still perform on the squares of Peru. The actors still ask questions.
To quote Johanna Mårtensson:
“The stories we encountered, the lives we touched, and the lives that touched us—these narratives cannot and should not be relegated to the past. They are living, ongoing realities. In this sense, the project must continue.”
That echoes how I feel. The structures proposed in this thesis—thinking tables, shared living containers, scenographic bridges—are not just research tools. They are invitations to keep working, to keep sharing responsibility.
This is also why I chose the website format: not as an archive, but as a living document. One that others can enter, revisit, and repurpose. And in doing so, the totality of this PhD in artistic research finds its completion—not as closure, but as activation. It gains meaning through its use, its re-use, and its ability to serve others.
Conclusion as Commitment
I began this PhD hoping that artistic research could be a site of transformation—not just for myself, or for the art field, but for the people and structures I engage with. Today, I no longer speak of that as a hope, but I speak of it as infiltrated commitment from which I can’t escape.
It is not a finished project, but an evolving practice—one that I now carry with more humility, more precision, and, despite everything, with more faith.
So this is my conclusion: Mining Life does not resolve the questions it began with. It transforms them into practice.
It proposes methodologies grounded in ethics, collaboration, and humility. It replaces authorship with co-authorship, and gestures with infrastructures. It trades recognition for redistribution. It acknowledges the exhaustion, the imbalance, and the limits of presence. It recognises that transformation is not always mutual, not always immediate, and not always clear. It insists that being affected—truly affected—is part of the method. That showing up fully, as an artist and as a person, is both the risk and the reward.
And it insists that what we build together—in vulnerability, in conflict, in laughter—no one can take away.
That is the gift. That is the responsibility. That is the future.
Mining Life 