Curators’ Statement
The project Palmasola - A Prison Village by Christoph Frick and KLARA Theaterproduktionen from Basel (Switzerland), is based on years-long research of one of the world's most notorious prisons, the so-called Palmasola prison village in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Built in the late 1980s, the prison is currently inhabited by over 6,000 men and women, of whom only 25% have been officially convicted. All the others are in a kind of preventive detention. Frick and his team are the only artistic company that has so far been granted permission to spend time inside Palmasola, talk to the inmates and other actors in this specific system and, in general, document their stay, which formed the basis of the performance. Palmasola tells the story of survival strategies necessary to endure such adverse social and living conditions. What intensifies this story even more is the manner in which it is told, as the audience are not merely passive observers watching something geographically or emotionally distant from the comfort of their seats in the dark. On the contrary, by watching this performance from the stage in close proximity to the performers, without being able to distance themselves or relax, viewers have the opportunity to somewhat experience what life is like in this prison village, but also to get a new perspective on the outside world they live in and the laws of survival within it, which may not be that very different from those in Palmasola.
About the Performance
Palmasola Prison in Santa Cruz de la Sierra has reliably occupied a top position in the cynical ranking of the "toughest prisons" in the world for years. In Palmasola, no cells are provided by the state, but the inmates must rent, buy or build their accommodation, sometimes even fight for it. The range extends from overcrowded mass camps to comfortable accommodation with domestic servants for the wealthy and gang leaders. However, the prison is not a lawless space, but different rules and laws apply than in the "normal world" outside.
For this project, the team of the theatre production Palmasola has been granted exclusive permission to make video and audio recordings in Palmasola for several days. The stories and information for the theatre evening were gathered from interviews with prisoners, lawyers, representatives of the prison government and the police, but above all through the theatre and video workshops with the prisoners.
The theatre evening tells of everyday life and the excesses of violence in prison. Through the fate of a newly imprisoned "gringo", a Swiss man arrested for cocaine smuggling, the audience learns about the mental and physical survival strategies of the inmates and the merciless rules of the prison.
The Author
Christoph Frick, born in 1960, is the director and co-founder of the Swiss independent group KLARA, with whom he creates his own plays and many coproductions between performance, concert, dance theatre and documentary theatre. As a follow up on Palmasola he created the production Dos Vidas. Zwei Leben based on the lives of a Bolivian and a German actor in 2023. Christoph Frick is interested in physical and process-oriented work with actors and has been working intensively for twenty years with various ensembles at municipal and state theatres such as Freiburg, Hanover, Bochum, Dresden, Mainz and Darmstadt. He repeatedly connects with authors to develop the plays together, most recently with Lothar Kittstein for the production Land at the Münchner Kammerspiele in 2024.
From the Reviews
"The play offers a strong social and political critique. It cannot be said that no one got up from their seats at the end of the play, as there were no seats, but in any case, almost no one moved, the groups were left scattered in different sectors, somewhat confused, with a hovering feeling of desolation and strangeness: you had to take a few minutes to find your way back to your own reality. I went home thinking how far written law is sometimes from the law practiced in this country."
Jorge Luna Ortuño, El Deber
