MILAN (ITALPRESS) – Recovering abandoned places and transforming them into artistic and cultural spaces open to the public, thus fostering the relationship between the city and the prison. With this philosophy, the “ReverseLab” space was inaugurated this morning in Milan’s San Vittore Prison. Part of the Off Campus San Vittore activities, the project takes advantage of a space managed by the Milan Polytechnic and opened in 2022 inside the prison itself. Thus from a disused wing of the prison formerly used as an isolation area of the maximum-security ward, a permanent laboratory of artistic and cultural production was born. The exhibition, made possible thanks to the contribution of Fondazione di Comunità Milano and in collaboration with Forme Tentative and Philo – Pratiche Filosofiche, will be open from Sept. 28 to Oct. 28 on Mondays and Saturdays in two shifts, from 2 to 3 p.m. and 3 to 4 p.m., by reservation.The first exhibition presented is titled “Artists are the ones who mess up. Fragments from San Vittore Prison”.The installation was conceived between March and June this year during a workshop led by artist Maurice Pefura involving about 40 inmates and also prison officers. The work winds its way down a long corridor and consists of hundreds of paper forms (in many cases post-it notes) crafted and assembled by the inmates. Each of these paper fragments creates an image that is only seemingly abstract: in reality, the visitor is accompanied in reading the inmates’ thoughts and emotions. Thus, even simple messages become pieces of a mosaic where even a simple silhouette of the inmates tells a true story.Accompanying the visitor, there are four cells inside which it is possible to listen to the reflections made by the inmates during the workshop: the first “Dèsolè maman” offers an intimate and personal portrait of the inmates; the second “Sole, dove sei?” reveals what it’s like to arrive in prison and spend your first night there; the third “I lost the moon” helps to understand what life in prison is like and the strange feeling of time that never seems to go by; the fourth “Don’t turn off the light” opens a glimpse into the future, what inmates want to do once they have served their sentences and what they would change about prison. “The university was created to respond to the needs for education and research, but also for social responsibility in the area. It is therefore important for our faculty and students to have a pragmatic experience of how we can support through training, research, innovation and attention to social issues communities that tend to be on the margins of society and the urban territory or in constricted dimensions like in San Vittore,” said Politecnico di Milano Rector Donatella Sciuto. “Art is a very powerful medium, a language that allows everyone to be able to express emotions and feelings in their own way. It is something democratic because it does not require special training: everyone can express themselves,” she added. “The Off Campuses themselves are a way for us at the Politecnico to not remain closed within ourselves by going to touch the problems of proximity and offering our students a life experience. “The director of the Casa Circondariale, Giacinto Siciliano, called the initiative “an important step because you take an abandoned space, you give it a new value and meaning and you do it by involving the people who live in this facility. “I don’t think it’s enough for there to be a real path of re-education, however, it is important that people feel like protagonists and realize that they can do positive things. Ours is a transit prison where people spend very little time: so we can only give stimuli, but it is important to do so.” , he added, stressing how “even in the problematic nature of a structure that is certainly old” to make people understand that if “you can contribute to improving the environment, so you can contribute to improving yourself. “Returning to the relationship to be kept alive between Milan and the prison, Siciliano reiterated how it is “important that those inside, inmates and operators, feel the city as a close part: it is important that the city and people enter so they can realize what is in here. Entering the prison means hearing the noises, the keys, leaving the phone, going through the controls…so getting into the logic of what it means to experience the prison and this is important otherwise we talk about a place without knowing” . “The idea was to build a space open to relationship. In here we worked on the relationship with the inmates to build the artwork coming to a project of relationship with the city. Here the city will be housed permanently as a space for contemporary art that here every year will replicate a new episode of this art work done with new inmates and a new artist. It’s a revolution because there is no prison as active and difficult as San Vittore that hosts inside it a communal space open to citizenship,” said Andrea di Franco of the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies at the Politecnico di Milano.Starting with the numerous post-it notes used in the work (and defined by artist Maurice Pefura as “fragments of life”), Di Franco speaks of an idea “just right to make the emotion and the communication of it direct, something complicated for inmates and young people who may not even speak Italian. In this way, all those pieces of paper “from hushed voices become a powerful voice and tell a choral adventure of emotions that will hopefully be heard outside.”
– photo Politecnico di Milano press office -(ITALPRESS).
