This photograph was taken inside the Poli-Valencia detention centre, where I began to understand what imprisonment means for women in Venezuela. The room had once been an investigation office, converted into a cell after authorities decided to move the women out of the main area, where they had been held alongside male detainees.
When I returned a year later, the space had been transformed. The women had made it their own, covering the walls with names, phrases and small drawings of hearts, even taping up a poster of the Colombian singer Maluma. What had once been a sterile office now held traces of their presence, their effort to hold on to a sense of identity in a place meant to erase it.
On one wall, someone had carved a phrase of both defiance and exhaustion: “I don’t expect anyone to believe in me because I don’t believe in anyone.”
You see women resting on thin mattresses on the floor, bodies intertwined, one woman’s legs serving as a pillow for another, as if physical closeness were the only comfort left in that airless room.
Here, for them, meant limbo: no ventilation, no running water, and days that bled into one another. Many did not know their lawyers, did not know when their trial would be, did not receive food, water or medical attention regularly; they waited in a kind of deranged inactivity for the possibility of a visit.
Two women in the image stayed with me long after I walked out of that room. Daniela, wearing the pink T-shirt, had been sentenced long before I met her. When I first photographed her in 2017, her family was unaware of her whereabouts. She had simply disappeared into the system. When I returned a year later, she told me her daughter had been diagnosed with leukaemia.
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The woman in yellow is Roxana. She had lived on the streets and struggled with addiction, and by the time we met, she had a liver abscess caused by long-term drug and alcohol use. She was also HIV positive. Every week, her father appeared with her medication and food; offering the steady presence of someone who refuses to give up.
She was in and out of jail for years. Once, after a release, I visited her at home. She was thin, sick and exhausted. In 2020, she told me she had survived a gunshot to the leg.
That was the turning point, she said. She stopped drinking and using drugs, moved back in with her father and began studying. Today, she is enrolled at a university and has written a book about her life.
This photograph is part of my ongoing series Días Eternos (Eternal Days). It is where the project began for me: a room never meant for living, transformed by women who refused to disappear.
