Women behind the lens: ‘They waited in a kind of deranged inactivity for the possibility of a visit’

In her portraits from an overcrowded Venezuelan detention centre, Ana María Arévalo Gosen captures the frustration of women desperate for news from their lawyers and families

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his 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.”