De haut en bas :
Série Clairvaux, #15, 2002
Série Clairvaux, #5, 2002
Série Clairvaux, 2002
Série Clairvaux, 2002
|
|
|
|
18 June - 14 September 2008
From 2001 to 2002, Eric Aupol led a photography workshop with inmates of the Centrale de Clairvaux, a French prison facility. In parallel, he carried out a photography project on the old prison, a ruined Cistercian abbey, whose crumbling walls seem to speak of the painful story of the men and women imprisoned within them.
Echoing the marks on the old stone walls, Eric Aupol has given concrete form to the ravages of memory and existence by photographing the body of an inmate, tattooed and scarred like the stones, the surface of his body bearing the story of a life of revolt and rebellion. Stone and flesh both bear the scars wrought by prison life.
"People used to tell me that Clairvaux is one of the harshest and most forbidding prisons in Europe, made famous by the guillotining of convicted murderers Buffet and Bontemps and Robert Badinter's magnificent diatribe against the death penalty.
Clairvaux is also where a certain Jean Genet was imprisoned ; it was there that he wrote Diary of a Thief.
And Clairvaux is a village in eastern France that sits under a sad, leaden sky.
The oldest inmates tell me that your vision quickly blurs there, as the eye can never focus on the far distance.
The prison's architecture seems designed to reduce available space and to offend the eye.
To leave marks on the body, forever.
So that an indelible imprint is scorched into people's memories.
After several months' work, T.C, an inmate for several years and a well-known upholder of prisoners' rights, agreed to pose for me. I wanted to deal with the special relationship between the walls of the prison and T.C.'s body, both of which can be seen as a palimpsest. The tattoos engraved into the man's skin, the marks of a social outcast, recall the marks on the building itself. […]
Some years later, I asked after T.C and was told that he had committed suicide shortly after his release.
More than a tribute, what I want to show here is a materiality. A body of flesh and a body of stone, against a backdrop of violence: that of memory and that of existence, eternally scarred in the half-darkness.
Today more than ever, when incarceration and humiliation seem to be the only recourse of power when faced with non-conformity, where every victim becomes an excuse for a new scheme to limit our freedoms, I just want to remember what the reality of prison can be like, when space gets confused and memory is the only defence against present suffering.
Because people suffer in prison, more than anywhere else.
The fact of being a Man must be defended every day in the face of the physical and mental violence endured by the inmates. Just staying upright and alive and putting one's life into perspective is a daily struggle for each and every one of them. Reality disappears from everyday existence, and inner strength becomes the only means for survival (these men spend 25 or 30 years inside).
As I write these words I think of T.C., of the talks we had, and of his absolute, uncompromising humanity.
He was a "long term inmate" I happened to meet one day, just like the others, full of the energy of revolt. "
Eric Aupol
Curators: Didier Kahn Sriber and Jean-Luc Monterosso.
|
|