Milano, 15 Oct. (askanews) – From 14 to 26 October, the PAC Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Milan hosts an unexpected fragment of the San Vittore prison on the upper floor in the Gallery and Project Room: a fragment of space and time that tells the ReverseLab project that the Prison Laboratory research group of the Polytechnic of Milan, Forme Tentative, Philo – Philosophical Practices, the PAC and the artist Maurice Pefura with 40 people detained they developed with the prison from March to November 2024. After a first exhibition “Artists are the ones who mess up” which took place in autumn 2024 inside the prison, the project arrives today in the center of Milan to give space to questions on the meaning of prison, on its existence within the body of the city and outside of time, on the usefulness of art in places of detention, on the real possibilities of research in places of imprisonment.
From the artistic workshop with the people detained in the San Vittore prison at the Pac in Milan
Marianna Frangipane, researcher at the Prison Laboratory of the Polytechnic of Milan and president of the Forme Tentative association, told Askanews about the project: “This exhibition arrives at the PAC in Milan with the idea of recounting an experience, but above all of call the city to question itself on a series of questions that this experience raises. ReverseLab is located in the basement space of the first radius of San Vittore and is a space project, an artistic project and above all a relational project.
It involved several actors to activate an artistic workshop carried out by the artist Maurice Pefura which involved more than 40 inmates to create a site-specific work which was placed inside the basement space which in turn was renovated to be open to the public and hosted more than 700 people who managed to enter the prison from all over the city of Milan. Art therefore represented the lens to allow both the prison and the city to look at and see each other. A call to the city to ask ourselves together about how this ReverseLab space can be reactivated, but also about how the prison in general can be opened to the city around it and can carry out projects in synergy with the prison, with those who live there, with those who work there and with those who live outside”.
Marianna Frangipane, researcher at the Prison Laboratory of the Polytechnic of Milan and president of the Forme Tentative association
Artists are the ones who mess up
The visual work in the Gallery, a smaller version of the site-specific work “The Artists are those who mess up”, is accompanied by two audio tracks, created by Chiara Ligi in collaboration with Marta Galli and Max Viale, in which the inmates entrust the visitor with a cross-section of their daily life inside the prison and their relationship with the outside, and by a third which records the sounds of the prison. The Project Room exhibits the space recovery work carried out by Forme Tentative and the process of carrying out the workshop led by the artist Maurice Pefura.
The ReverseLab project in San Vittore
The ReverseLab project, launched with the support of Fondazione Comunità Milano, is part of the activities of the Off Campus program of the Polytechnic of Milan which since 2022 has established a research center within the detention space on the mezzanine floor of the first range of the San Vittore prison. This university space, which leaves the walls of the academy to carry out field research, attempts to build from inside the prison that fundamental network of relationships capable of mobilizing a project of transformation in the context of imprisonment.
The space of the prison remains, just as the large public space remains hidden, silent and full of more than 120 years of stories, waiting for the next piece, for a new fragment. The objective is to continue to use the space of the first radius of the San Vittore prison to create new workshops and activities with those who live and work in the structure and then share the results with the citizens, always within the same place.
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