Z.O.T – Breathing Life into Silenced Voices Across the Caribbean
The second cohort of projects funded by the CCF is now underway. One of the earliest is an innovative project led by Back Art Diffusion from Guadeloupe. Back Art Diffusion has partnered with a sound and choreographic performance artist, forming the feminist collective Z.O.T — Zone d’Occupation Transitoire — which leads multidisciplinary workshops for women incarcerated in the French Caribbean.
Born from the encounter of three dynamic and socially engaged women artists – Myriam Solanges and Guy Gabon from Guadeloupe, and Anne Meyer from French Guiana – Z.O.T draws from the power of visual arts, choreographic performance, and sound creation to help women in contexts marked by extreme precarity and invisibilization to weave new stories of justice, creativity, and transformation.
Their project “Les News de la MAF” gives voices to incarcerated Afro-descendant and Indigenous women at the Maison d’Arrêt des Femmes (MAF) in French Guiana. The collective explains that “the project arises from a political and human urgency: to denounce the systemic discrimination that permeates the prison system, where women are not only a minority but also largely forgotten when it comes to rights, access to healthcare and education, and recognition of their specific realities, such as motherhood and separation from their children, or the violence they have experienced.” Their work reminds us that in confinement, dignity, dreams, sensitivity and beauty can persist.
Art as Resistance
For Z.O.T, creation is resistance. Each movement, sound, and sculpture crafted in their workshops becomes an act of reclaiming space, presence, and humanity. In a system where many women are incarcerated, because of offenses stemming from socio-economic vulnerability (notably as so-called mules in drug trafficking networks), this project and its activities break through, bearing witness to realities and emotions that words alone cannot capture. The collective powerfully describes how “much is lived through the body, in silence, in glances, in absences, in interrupted gestures or dreamed movements”.
Their work is shaped by the women themselves, each piece holding an emotional universe — sorrow, strength, tenderness, rage, and hope. For example, one activity is clay breast sculptures, which demonstrate both powerful symbols and delicate materials, that hold and embody the memory of the unique emotional state, and the female body—the one that nourishes, gives, endures, is desired or violated, often without having a say.
In their multidisciplinary artistic approach each medium serves a purpose: Choreography gives form to impulse, constraint, repetition, and waiting. It expresses confinement as much as the drive for life. Sound—voice recordings, breaths, ambient noises—carries intimate stories and conveys a real presence, even in the absence of bodies. Visual arts and video mapping preserve traces and imprints, creating a symbolic space where emotions are anchored in matter. This weaving of languages honors the complexity and depth of incarcerated women’s lived experiences and it is “as much an ethical as an artistic choice: not to reduce, not to simplify. To welcome, with care, their humanity—in fragments.”
Listening to the Silenced
Through deep trust-building, Z.O.T’s workshops have unlocked raw, vital stories: tales of fractured families, survival, sacrifice, but also of laughter, and the unquenchable thirst for freedom. “What moved us deeply was the quality of listening and presence they showed—their ability to open up, to create, to experiment despite the walls, the strict schedules, the fatigue, the fear, or the shame. Some danced, others spoke—sometimes at length, sometimes just a few words. But in every gesture, there was something raw and powerful, a vital need to exist differently, if only for a moment. These workshops revealed a tremendous potential for resilience, unexpected surges of sisterhood, and above all, a need for art as a space for breath, for inner freedom.”
Their installation Les News de la MAF, set to tour French Guiana and Guadeloupe, will amplify these unheard voices, pushing Caribbean communities to confront the impact of patriarchal, colonial legacies on justice systems that continue to fail women.
“Art won’t solve injustice directly—but it opens cracks in the system. It awakens, mobilizes, and makes us remember that dignity cannot be erased.”