ABSTRACT
This chapter theorizes what I call “cartographies of affect” as an alternative way of remembering prison spaces and doing politics. First, I analyze a situation in which prison geography becomes historical through the process of remembrance when former women political prisoners from Córdoba (Argentina) created an artistic reconfiguration of space, when the prison from which they successfully escaped in the early 1970s closed in 2004 and later opened as both a cultural and commercial center. Second, I examine works of poetry and mural painting carried out by current common prisoners while doing time at the Santa Martha de Acatitla facility in Iztapalapa, Mexico City. Among other things, the murals work as collective forms of memory building that produce an historical geography of the prison from within, transforming the walls into expressive mediums of a history of place.
