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The Graffiti Art in Prison (GAP) Project, part of the University of Palermo Museum System (SIMUA), is the result of an international partnership with the Max-Planck-Institut for Art History in Florence, the DEMS of the University of Palermo, the University of Saragossa and the ABADIR Academy of Art and Design in Catania, with the patronage of the Italian Ministry of Justice, the Department of Penitentiary Administration (DAP) and the Ministry of Culture.
This publication is a result of the Graffiti Art in Prison (GAP) Project, n. 2020-1-IT02-KA203-080009, funded by the European Union within the Program Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership for Higher Education (2020-2023). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
Preface
The editors
In his 1967 essay Des Espaces Autres, the French philosopher Michel Foucault described the prison as an ‘other space’ or ‘counterspace’, an environment designed to control both body and mind. In prison, the wall isolates, separates, and oppresses. Yet through graffiti, it can perform the opposite function, becoming a tool for communication, a surface that connects across space and time. Graffiti and exposed writings create narratives that transform the wall from an impassive container into a ‘heterotopic space’ in the sense of the mirror; it exists in reality while also containing the projection of the writer, who reconstitutes the self through the signs on the wall. An important role of graffiti in prisons is to transcend their boundaries, to expand the physical and mental limits of the enclosed space. Inspired by this idea, the Graffiti Art in Prison (GAP) Project explored spaces of confinement and artistic responses to them. The aim was to link one of Sicily’s most significant cultural sites, the Inquisition prison in Palermo’s Palazzo Chiaramonte (Steri), known for its remarkable historical graffiti, with artistic expression in contemporary prisons. To achieve this, we compared this unique ‘document-monument’ with other examples of prison graffiti and wall paintings from a diachronic perspective, without geographical, temporal, or semantic limitations.
The GAP Project is the result of a collaboration between universities, research institutions, and prison environments, testing a new educational model that emphasizes an interdisciplinary and horizontal approach. The project involved the participation of artists, scholars, experts, and students, all engaged in reflecting on prison conditions and creative responses to the space of confinement. Participants were encouraged to collaborate in reimagining university and cultural institutions as spaces for fostering collective social awareness. Central to this educational process was a group of international doctoral students from diverse backgrounds in the humanities, each proposing research projects across various disciplines. Over the three-year program (2020-2023), six intensive study weeks were organized in partner countries, including Italy, Spain, and Germany. The goal was to explore graffiti techniques and practices, as well as the methodological issues surrounding them, such as the relationship
Rita Foti
Di la desiderata libertati:
The Graffiti of the Palermitan Holy Office’s Secret Prisons
Fig. 1 — Sanctoral cycle / decorative cycle / exposed inscription (ground floor, cell I, central wall), Secret Prisons of the Inquisition, Palazzo Chiaramonte, Palermo.
Photo: Sistema Museale di Ateneo dell‘Università degli
Studi di Palermo
Fig. 2 — Annunciation and Incarnation / sanctoral cycle (ground floor, cell II, central wall), Secret Prisons of the Inquisition, Palazzo Chiaramonte, Palermo. Photo: Sistema Museale di Ateneo dell‘Università degli Studi di Palermo
Fig. 3 — Descensus Christi ad inferos / inscriptions in Sicilian vernacular (canzuni) and in English (ground floor, cell II, central wall), Secret Prisons of the Inquisition, Palazzo Chiaramonte, Palermo. Photo: Sistema Museale di Ateneo dell‘Università degli Studi di Palermo
Fig. 4 — Sanctoral cycles / decorative cycles / inscriptions in Latin, Italian and English, (first floor, cell V, right wall), Secret Prisons of the Inquisition, Palazzo Chiaramonte, Palermo. Photo: Sistema Museale di Ateneo dell‘Università degli Studi di Palermo
Art in Spaces of Confinement
Christine Kleiter, Federica Testa
The Historical Prisons of Florence: From Center to Periphery
Walking through the streets of modern-day Florence, a rather invisible part of the urban history of the city is often overlooked: the remains of its historical prisons. While some structures have survived, others have been re-appropriated in various forms and proper prison buildings have been replaced through modern urban planning. This article seeks to give an overview of those historical prisons and their various destinies while arguing for their importance to the city and its development. It considers, in chronological order, Le Stinche, the Bargello, Le Murate, Santa Verdiana and Santa Teresa not as single buildings but mostly as a set of examples resulting in a pattern where spaces of confinement have been moved more and more towards the periphery. Whereas the medieval city housed prisons and their inmates in various facilities right in the city center, a marginalization of prisons can be observed from the eighteenth century onwards, a time when personalities such as Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) and Jeremy Bentham (1748 -1832) were re-thinking penology and Florence was becoming a ‘modern’ town.1 In 1983, the opening of the prison in Sollicciano, a Florentine neighborhood in the western periphery of the city, represented a further step in this marginalization process.
Historically, Florentine prisons were adaptions of other, preexisting spaces like the vaults – called the Burelle – under the ruins of the Roman amphitheater (where the Palazzo Vecchio is now located) and towers, such as the Torre della Pagliazza (used as a female prison) or the room in the tower of the Palazzo della Podestà (today known as the Bargello),2 both of which were used as prison spaces for short periods.3 The increasing number of inmates and the need for more space, however, forced the city to find new structures for imprisonment. Italian Renaissance
1. On modern penology see Geltner 2008a, p. 10; Johnston 2000, pp. 42-66.
2. A former private tower of the Boscoli family incorporated into the Palazzo and later called Volognana.
3. Many privately-owned spaces such as towers or entire buildings were rented by the city if needed to accommodate prisoners for a short period. The tower of Palazzo Vecchio, called L’alberghettino, served as a prison for Cosimo Il Vecchio de’ Medici in 1433 and Girolamo Savonarola in 1498. See Geltner 2008b, p. 12; Wolfgang 1960, pp. 154, 164.
Fig. 2 — Representation of the Palazzo del Podestà in Florence with a defamatory painting in progress; in D‘Altomare Giovanni, Angeli Politiani Conjurationis Pactianae anni MCCCCLXXVIII commentarium: Documentis, figuris, notis, nunc primum inlustratum, Naples 1769, p. 139. Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-PlanckInstitut
32. Bevilacqua 2014, p. 970.
33. On the history of the convent see Orefice 1996; Farneti, Van Riel 2017, pp. 19-44.
34. On the suppression of women’s convents in Florence by Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo (Motuproprio, 21 March 1785), see Fantozzi Micali, Roselli 1980.
35. Farneti, Van Riel 2017, pp. 49-65.
remaining within the walls, was based on a strict distancing from male religious communities, secular institutions and overcrowded squares. The female monasteries were also located along main axes and arteries, constituting veritable religious itineraries.32 In Florence, this area corresponded to the eastern part of the city, which had seen the presence the Le Murate and Santa Verdiana convents since the late Middle Ages, and it was further expanded and completed with the nuns of Santa Teresa in 1628. They were all located along the Via Ghibellina, a road that connects the Bargello in a direct line to the margins of the medieval city.
Santa Verdiana and Santa Teresa
The monastery of Santa Verdiana was founded in the late Gothic period and reached its maximum expansion between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, when its adaptation to Tridentine standards was an opportunity to restore the entire complex.33 Between 1767 and 1782 there was a considerable reduction in the number of convents in Florence because of the Leopoldine suppressions.34 Although included in the list of religious institutions to be converted into schools or transformed for community use, Santa Verdiana managed to survive up to the Napoleonic period, closing in 1808. Thereafter the convent began a process of secularization that would culminate in 1865 with its conversion into a women’s prison. This not only involved functional changes in the existing buildings, like closing the arches of the cloister, but also required the construction of entirely new sections for more cells and spaces of isolation.35 During the
twentieth century, women in Santa Verdiana were mostly imprisoned for political reasons, correlating with developments in the same decades at Le Murate.
The convent of Santa Teresa was founded in the first half of the seventeenth century and was located within the thirteenth century city walls in an area of civic expansion.36 As with Santa Verdiana, the convent‘s suppression was ordered by the French government in 1808.37 In 1866 a royal decree authorized the occupation of the convent as a prison and in 1871 there were reports of the hiring and transfer of guards to the prison of Santa Teresa. In order to adapt the space for the new purpose, profound changes affected the former convent complex: the cloister and the church remained quite the same while the rest of the original building became almost unrecognizable. Santa Verdiana and Santa Teresa were both turned into prisons in the same years that Florence became the capital of Italy. With the emerging need to find the structures required to accommodate new state functions, the former convents, with summary adjustments, were quickly adapted to new uses.38 The occupation of convents was also implemented through a law of the newly created Regno d’Italia, which allowed the occupation of buildings of religious corporations for reasons of public service.39 At the outset of purpose-built prison construction, convents were thus converted into spaces that could be used as prisons; this was also a result of the integration, from the Middle Ages on, of the Catholic Church with the political-administrative establishments of the state. The concept of solitary confinement found its most suitable form in the distribution of cells along a corridor
Fig. 3 — Representation of the Ponte delle Grazie in Florence; in D‘Altomare Giovanni, Angeli Politiani Conjurationis Pactianae anni MCCCCLXXVIII commentarium: Documentis, figuris, notis, nunc primum inlustratum, Naples 1769, p. 77. Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-PlanckInstitut
36. For more details on the foundation of the convent and its early history see Richa, 1755 (1972), vol. 1, pp. 333-355.
37. In these years the gran ducal architect Giuseppe Del Rosso was commissioned to draw up a complete plan of the Santa Teresa complex, which is considered the first document to fully analyze the building’s fabrication. The plan is reproduced in Giannoni 2016, p. 110.
38. Giannoni 2016, p. 115.
39. Law 384 (22 December 1861), ‘Che accorda al Governo la facoltà di occupare per ragioni di pubblico servizio le Case delle Corporazioni religiose’.
40. Pennisi 2021, pp. 24-25.
Fig. 1 — Segundo Escolar Díez, photographs taken at Bermeo’s Psychiatric Sanatorium, 1975. Courtesy of S. Escolar Díez
Fig. 2 — Segundo Escolar Díez, photographs taken at Bermeo’s Psychiatric Sanatorium, 1975. Courtesy of S. Escolar Díez
removal of the plaque in tribute to Francisco Largo Caballero (1869-1946) in Plaza de Chamberí, or the attempt to erase the names of Largo Caballero and Indalecio Prieto (1883-1962), both prominent Socialist Party politicians during the Second Republic (1931-1939), from the Madrid street map. This attitude towards these murals reflects the symbolic violence that right-wing extremism manifests against the feminist movement. But this is part of a wider war against everything represented by the left wing and its social values.
In short, walls are the main urban elements that determine and limit a landscape. They are inert elements that come in a variety of types: building walls, garden walls, façades, stone walls and partition walls. From the first spontaneous graffiti to today’s urban projects, artistic wall contributions affect a city’s landscape and aesthetics and, as a result, the lives of the people living there. Walking down an unfamiliar street is not the same as walking down a street in which an image or poem calls out to you to stop, look and reflect on the artist’s message. ‘Cities are a creative stage that encourages relationship dynamics and exchanges between those that make street art and those inhabiting the public space’.29 However, as a result of the culture war, these urban stages are also the battleground for ideologies. This situation can be seen in the damage inflicted on the murals paying tribute to women that appeared in Spanish cities for International Women’s Day in 2021. Some have been repainted by the residents. Others have been created to pay homage to those that have been defaced. Collective murals or graffiti awaken feelings of belonging among communities. The wall that seemingly belonged to nobody acquires another life while its inhabitants, painters and spectators consider the art to be theirs. The painting is a reminder and a testimony of the sum of individual efforts to achieve a common goal: teamwork, negotiations and agreements reached through assertive dialogue culminate in creative and playful actions such as mural painting. This is the only way to explain the response to a seemingly minor initiative (replacing one mural with another) by a political group that wanted to remove a neighborhood wall.
29. Klein 2018, p. 134.
Fig. 5 — Unlogic Crew, the mural La union hace la fuerza, Ciudad Lineal neighbourhood, Madrid, 2023. Photo: Jorge Jimenez Lopez
5. Boccali 2022.
6. Lovata, Olton 2015.
7. Faletra 2015.
8. According to semiotic theory, a sign’s meaning is not limited to the sign itself nor to its appearance; it continues to generate meaning by the mere fact of having been conceived, configured and reutilized.
9. Tatour 2022, p. 249.
I Asked for Pen and Paper
The liberating power of the written word resonates with particular force on the part of ‘political’ prisoners, whose imprisonment serves the strategic purpose of their individual suppression. In such circumstances, the simple lack of pencil and paper clearly constitutes the most odious of punishments. While a state of confinement surely entails a general physical deterioration, such as a progressive weakening of eyesight through persistent immobility and lack of perspective cues, the need for self-expression can manifest itself in indirect forms.5 Symbols or words carved into cell walls form a palimpsest of sentimental legacies, expressions of suffering, loneliness, anguish, hope, rage or faith. These walls are places of personal expression and semantic re-appropriation: artefacts of crossings, most often accomplished with very limited means.6 History has often left only fragile, insubstantial traces of these singular and ‘involuntary’ iconographic repositories, owing to the very nature of their medium and the environments in which they are found. Yet in some cases they possess great historical, social and anthropological value.7 An illustrated inventory of human experience that transforms silent grey environments into pages of vivid autobiography, decipherable in turn by other inmates; such a space becomes, in semiotic terms, a ‘text-manifesto’.8 It is a history that repeats itself, as apparent in words of the
Courtesy Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan/Naples and the artist, New York
Palestinian poet and activist Dareen Tatour, imprisoned ‘because of a poem’ invoking her people’s resistance that circulated on social networks (fig. 2). Her unjust detention moved her not only to outrage but also to an intrigued interest in the lives transcribed on the walls of her cell, on which she too left the mark of her ‘prison poetry’ so that others could read and understand the anguish of her indefensible punishment and her licit claim to individual freedom.
Lots of things written on the wall intrigued me, and I started to read and examine them: various phrases in Arabic, Hebrew and English; the names of people who had passed through here; a picture of a heart; a love arrow with initials; prayers and insults. I would read them – sometimes laughing, sometimes lamenting – and would empathise with whoever had written the phrase. I wished that I had my camera with me to photograph this rare painting, and felt an even stronger need for a pen, and for writing itself. I asked for pen and paper, but the prison guard refused to give me anything. I tried to understand the reason, her plea that it was prohibited by law here.9
Phase 1: ten meetings in which female inmates, female guards and doctoral students pooled their knowledge and skills. We held workshops in dance, crochet, cappelletti pasta, baking pancakes, writing, drawing and painting. Each participant expressed whatever she wanted to share with her companions. Teaching things to one another, or sharing manual and repetitive activities, cultivates a nearness between people, an almost physiological intimacy. This state of relations often allows people to let themselves go, reducing the distance that circumstances put between them. Certain sentiments and wishes were confided in me, which I then carried into the work that I created for the jail.
Phase 2: a work created on the paving of the women’s pavilion’s inner courtyard, replicating two letters sent from each of two women to the other. Their context is unclear; there is no telling who is inside and who out. They consist of a breathless stream of consciousness, rife with references. We wrote them on the ground together in white waterproof paint, all together: female inmates, female guards, doctoral students.
Phase 3: a video work in collaboration with Chiara Agnello, made with our four hands and two hearts. We asked the inmates to express wishes in the form of prayers. The filming became part of Chiara’s workshop: we turned the girls into Saint Rosalias and staged dances, prayers and circular processions in the courtyard. Each of them recited her own prayer. One of the most moving was one woman’s wish for an avocado stone from which to grow a seedling.
Stefania Galegati, Due lettere, white paint, 2022. Permanent installation in the prison yard, Pagliarelli prison, Palermo. Photos: Enrica Zaccone
culpasti, noli te excusare; verum detege, et in Domino confide (If innocent, do not accuse yourself; if guilty, do not justify yourself; reveal the truth and trust in the Lord). Under the guidance of Giovanna Fiume, who has dedicated many years to the study of the Steri graffiti, we engaged in a conversation about these inscriptions and their imagery and iconography. We also speculated about the lives and the conditions of those who were confined in Palermo five centuries ago.
In dialogue with the selected graffiti, the residents of Malaspina created new drawings and texts. They produced poems and sketches, adding to the original iconography, wrote song lyrics, and came up with a logo for a fashion brand called ‘icon’. We transferred the selected graffiti and these new creations onto vinyl paper and, using the sublimation method via a heat press, printed them on t-shirts and hooded sweatshirts. By the end of the third day, we realized that we had produced more than sixty garments. Many residents of Malaspina later gave these custom pieces to their loved ones as presents.
This note, which only briefly retraces the processes at work in those three days of collaborative study and creation, serves as a thank you to the participants‘ generous creativity and is dedicated to the residents of Malaspina and the ‘art of making do’.
Elisa Giardina Papa with Giovanna Fiume, 2022, Workshop on graffiti and writing on streetwear, Malaspina juvenile prison, Palermo. Photos: Laura Barreca
David Mesguich at Sollicciano Prison, Florence
World of Fence
My contribution to the GAP Project is research, but also an experience, a real-life laboratory, and the starting point of a search for an impossible remedy.
In 2021 I was contacted by Gabriella Cianciolo Cosentino, who introduced herself as the coordinator of a project aimed at documenting the past and present history of graffiti in the prison environment. Having questioned this theme for many years through my various personal and artistic experiences, she proposed that I share my past experiences in French correctional facilities and at the same time create something new in an Italian prison. I accepted without hesitation, suggesting that we go beyond simply documenting or engaging with these spaces and instead modify them, challenging their restrictive nature with a riskier yet more ambitious approach. We both quickly became convinced that something powerful could emerge from it. My idea was to create several monumental installations within the prison walls and to conduct painting workshops: I was excited about the idea of transforming the facility. I proposed to bring to the project someone who would document the whole process with both a journalistic and artistic eye: Martha Cooper, the famous street art photographer whom I had met a year earlier in Belgium while I was painting a wagon in a train depot. After a brief exchange, she agreed to join me in Sollicciano prison and be part of the GAP Project.
Prisons exist, that is a fact, and it is impossible to dismantle them for reasons that are evident to most, the foremost being that they represent the only solution found and accepted for societal problems. If I cannot destroy them, then they must be changed, questioned, and challenged piece by piece, wall by wall. I do not like prisons, but I do not allow myself to judge those
While I saw her go through difficult moments (where I tried to offer my support), she often gave me strength. She managed to transform this dark experience into something beautiful, a creative force that she used to narrate her daily life, her feelings, her questions through an illustrated diary that she kindly shared with me, Martha Cooper, and the other participants.
Photo: Martha Cooper
Photo: David Mesguich
Photo: Martha Cooper
Photo: zero_stress
to take some photos which combined his art with the impressive architecture of Sollicciano prison. I was, however, reprimanded by a guard for taking a photo of David as he carried a piece of sculpture across the inner courtyard. Although the prison guards were mostly friendly and helpful, I had to be careful not to push their boundaries for fear of being denied further access.
On my second trip to Sollicciano, I was able to photograph a graffiti workshop with prisoners painting on the walls outside the prison along with academics from the GAP Project. Because inmates dress in their regular street clothes, I sometimes had difficulty identifying who was who. Again, my challenge as a documentary photographer was to find an angle which showed both the artists at work and the prison environment. Because the art was being painted on the bottom of very high walls, I had to shoot at an acute angle in order to see the prison although this was not the best angle to show the art.
Graffiti Art is sometimes called ‘style writing’, an apt name which refers to artists (also known as writers) stylizing the letters of their names. The term graffiti is also used to describe all kinds of non-stylish, unauthorized writing on public surfaces. David had shown me some interesting examples of ancient, or at least historic, graffiti he had seen in a prison in Palermo. I had
Martha Cooper, photographs at Sollicciano prison, Florence, 20222023
hoped to find some of this unsanctioned writing by prisoners in Sollicciano. We were able find a few modern examples scratched into a wooden desk and into tape on a window. Probably there were more in places I was not allowed to go such as the inmates’ bathroom.
Taking pictures of finished art on a wall is easy. Walls don’t move. However, a straight-on, still photo of art on a wall doesn’t show the tools and techniques of the artist or the surrounding environment. The best photographs of street art give the viewer an idea of how and where the art was made. The highlight of my Sollicciano experience was when a group of guards came by to help David lift his sculpture into place on the exterior fence. I was happy finally to be able to take photos which not only showed David’s sculpture in the context of the prison, but also the positive interaction between the artist and the institution.
GRAFFITI ART IN PRISON EXPLORES GRAFFITI IN SPACES OF INCARCERATION AND REPRESSION, FROM THE PRISONS OF THE SPANISH INQUISITION IN THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES TO MODERN CORRECTIONAL FACILITIES. THIS VOLUME ALSO FEATURES PHOTOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTATION OF WORKSHOPS HELD IN THE PRISONS OF PALERMO AND FLORENCE, WHERE ARTISTS, PRISONERS, AND STUDENTS WORKED TOGETHER USING ART AS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE OF EXPRESSION AND UNDERSTANDING.
