The Holy Prison

Isabella Chiadini

It is difficult to realize that you are in front of a prison unless you are on the opposite side, beyond the little bridge that crosses the canal, and even then you need to have good eyesight to notice that above a massive door – like many in Venice – there is an old-fashioned oval enamelled plaque, from the Ministry of Justice, which defines this building as a prison.

The white facade is squeezed inside other buildings that before becoming a prison it was a convent. Little has changed from its original structure made of cloisters and courtyards that fit into each other and expand inwards. On the wall of the deconsecrated church next to the prison there is a mural Father of two large feet by Maurizio Cattelan. The shades – some more nuanced, others more intense – of grays, blacks and whites blend in some places with the white of the wall. It is we who must look carefully they who offer themselves to us despite their enormity. Only at this point, after having lingered on the details, could we make a further leap from the decision to have stopped. We could overcome – in a broader sense – the limited vision of inanimate details and bring them back to a body. They are painful, dirty, hardened, eaten away, perhaps wounded feet; they are the feet of a poor, fragile, perhaps adrift person. They are bare feet but it is not nudity that they show; their exposure does not deprive them of the strength of modesty and dignity. It is a sense of estrangement that those feet induce. Estrangement from the hypertrophic self, which we let go, even for just a moment, to take on a gaze that is not our own. The Holy See Pavilion was designed as a physical and conceptual opening of a prison – whose existence we often collectively tend to disregard. Cattelan’s work offers us the key to understanding, the cipher, of the Holy See exhibition project, which the artists and curators define as a true manifesto, which therefore rests on a common thread: the authentic and respectful desire to get closer to the complexity of lives we do not know. In this case, the lives of the inhabitants of the Giudecca Women’s Prison in Venice.

The Shakespearean verse “I love thee not with my eyes” (Sonnet 141) echoing the verses 42.5 of the Book of Job, “Mine eyes have seen thee.” informs the concept of the Pavilion inspired by the two verses that reflect and dissolve into each other. “A cross-fading that blurs into an action where seeing becomes synonymous with touching, of embracing with the eye, of allowing a dialogue between sight and perception”. There are eight artists whom Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, Cardinal Prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, has chosen: Maurizio Cattelan, Bintou Dembélé, Simone Fattal, Claire Fontaine, Sonia Gomes, Corita Kent, Marco Perego & Zoe Saldana, Claire Tabouret. And there are two curators: Chiara Parisi, and Bruno Racine. His Eminence Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça says that “it is certainly not a coincidence that the title of the Holy See Pavilion wants to drive our attention on the drama of the representations in our eyes” but this is not a metaphorical gaze … comfortably protected by that anonymous voyeurism that contemporaneity has globalized. The title With My Eyes contains in itself something both disruptive and prophetic; it proposes a step in a different cultural direction, questioning this our time in which human vision is increasingly deferred and less direct …. Will we still know what it is to ‘see with our own eyes’? The Holy See has chosen to develop its project in a space that we could define as a non-pavilion, and not only that: the works we see are the result of the collaboration between the artists and the inmates, who also have the role of guides. Bruno Racine asks himself “How can the historically handed down concept of the ‘national pavilion’ be interpreted today? The peculiarity of the Holy See, a singular state lacking a national art scene, prompted us to experiment with a new formula. The Giudecca Women’s Prison House was the answer.”

Chiara Parisi explains, “Although it is forbidden to take photographs, we trust that this experience will remain in the visitor’s memory … with their eyes…” Parisi says that the strength of the project lies in its underlying idea: “In a surprising corner of the world, artists and female inmates join expressive forces in an unusual collaboration, prison reality and unlimited artistic expression meet and seduce each other: this is the heart of the Holy See Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2024, a project with an incredible visual narrative. The exhibit is an interweaving of relationships that have evolved over time, in an environment where being observed or judged need not enter, and that reflects what we desire for ourselves, wherever we are”.

It’s almost time to go in; we are told that our phones, documents, and everything else, must be packed away. Therefore I am getting ready to rely on my human memory the images and feelings that most likely will overcome me; mainly because what I am going to experience in this place appears to be remarkable and because I know that I’ll have to tell what I’m going to see without any cell phone crutches. Never has a queue time been so useful to establish a necessary connection among the small waiting group. We share so much perceptible emotion
that a few chats make us a sort of unique entity, however labile, whose only purpose is listening and seeing. I likely will be out in about 45 minutes but, as one of the women will tell us shortly, anyone could end up here.
We see prison life and expectations in the short film shown in a small bare room. The protagonist of the film, shot by the Italian artist Marco Perego, is the American actress Zoe Saldana, who delicately blends in with the faces and bodies of the inmates, who made the film with her. The film tells in 16 minutes the last hours of a woman who is about to leave prison while another woman is about to enter. Perego makes us slowly approach the prison, from a shining Venice; but it’s a matter of a moment and we’re inside a cell: a dormitory with more or less 10 beds – a table, lockers, a bathroom without a door, shared showers – where everything happens under the gaze of others, whether they are the prison guards or the other inmates.

Get undressed, raise your arms, open your mouth, stick out your tongue. Hands that wear latex gloves and eyes that scrutinize. Up, down, show your hands, get dressed. The guards do what they have to do; the inmate cries. The guards, imperturbable, don’t pay attention. This is one of the scenes: without frills and aseptic; it represents reality and at the same time also suggests what is not explicitly said. Marco Perego and Zoe Saldana said they arrived at Giudecca with a screenplay but then the film developed little by little. The only certainty they had was that they wanted to make a film in which the inmates expressed themselves both through the contribution of their ideas and in the staging. How difficult it must have been to show so much of oneself in a place that one is often ashamed of, or that one is ashamed of having been in. The inmates, at first, did not want to meet the two artists. They hid under the sheets. This makes it beautiful and touching, you feel the essence of the people beyond what they may have done before entering those cells. You perceive – almost under your skin – how a life is led in those suffocating spaces. You perceive the deprivation of freedom but, in some way, also the glimmers that open up and alleviate the constraints: coffee, work, friendships despite everything:
from a narrow street we enter a room – it is a cafeteria – whose counter recalls the Italian bars of the 1960s and 1970s. All the walls of the room – except for the one of the counter – are covered with the works of Corita Kent, a former nun and American artist who died in 1986. Her works are hung by layering. Someone who loves painting gives away his works; these are added to other paintings, which are added to group photographs and many other things. I don’t know if there was anything hanging on those walls before the arrival of Corita Kent’s works, but what is certain is that they have found their place, inside that room, like everything that accumulates inside this type of place. All the works on display contain words: letters of the alphabet more or less colored and more or less large and therefore thoughts swallowed up by the room that contains them; but at the same time, the text conveys the message by emerging from the background; it is striking. The bar we see inside the Giudecca is not a display: it is the one frequented by the prison guards; a sort of recreational club where the inmates work as bartenders. And where could the words of Corita Kent, an artist-activist who has fought against all kinds of oppression all her life, fit in if not in a place where the work of some intersects with the recreation of others? I believe that Kent’s silkscreens, colorful and pop, are in a coffee shop because the meaning of that place – located in a prison – lies in the possibility of increasing the connections between the women and men who frequent it. Those connections give work back its participatory and humanizing peculiarity; those who have to serve a sentence – but also those who supervise – rediscover the ethical dimension of the work. As happens in the bars outside the Giudecca prison, those whose walls are layers of artifacts, I imagine that relationships are developing around Corita Kent’s works that go beyond sterile obedience and orders as an end in themselves.

The cafeteria is the first room we saw; right there, looking at Kent’s works together with our guides, the tension dissolved; at a certain point, one of the inmate lecturers couldn’t help but abandon the safety of the written sheet, “sometimes it takes time to understand what is important to say.”

Leaving the cafeteria we see a succession of words in front of us, which emerge from slabs of lava rock hanging on the wall of an open-air corridor; a barbed wire fence rises from the wall. The Syrian-Lebanese artist Simone Fattal collaborated with the inmates so that their thoughts, their poems or their prayers would welcome those who, like us, come to visit. “…My life is an invisible planet…”, “I scream while remaining silent…”, “A father gives his children this whole world” Simone Fattal and the curators define it as a visual dialogue; the inhabitants of Giudecca introduce themselves by putting into words their feelings, desires, sadness, anger, melancholy and even joy. Some say that practicing writing generates miracles: I don’t know if it’s really like that but I’m sure that trying to start writing, deciding to dedicate time to giving substance to something confused, that would otherwise escape, is one of the happiest ways, in a certain sense, to investigate the deepest self. A jumble of lines, colors and material density that perhaps evokes the complex personalities of the authors, who are prisoners, but are also much more. “Before going to sleep ask yourself if you are satisfied with your life…” Susanna. “I am in this beautiful historic building, where duties are the mantra of every day… I feel the heat in every corner of these “walls”…” IRIS M.C.U.

At the end of the corridor, on the wall of the watchtower, an eye of neon tubes crossed by an oblique line watches us. Sensitive Content is the work of the feminist collective Claire Fontaine formed by Giulia Carnevale and James Thornill. It is the larger version of the eye that appears when a photograph, on Instagram, is obscured to protect us from potentially shocking content. “Instagram uses this warning with the intention of protecting us by making us choose not to see a certain image, just as we do not see people who live in prison. In these months of work for the exhibition, many guests have shown that they have extraordinary talents, but the conditions of detention mean that they are not valued.” Through a door in the corridor we enter the central courtyard, also called the Corte del Passeggio because it is here that the inmates can spend time outdoors: a few benches, a few trees, an old stone well and clotheslines. On a wall of one of the four buildings surrounding the courtyard stands a neon sign; it says in letters large enough to be read from afar, We are with you in the night. The sign is visible from the windows of the cells and by those who hang out in the courtyard; in the evening the neon tubes light up in an intense blue: the light stands out clearly within the space surrounded by walls and barred windows. The work, created by the collective in 2008, has already been exhibited in front of the Museo del Novecento in Florence in 2020/21; it takes up a phrase that appeared in front of the prisons of some Italian cities in the 1970s. Claire Fontaine amplifies its value by making it as visible as possible: loaded with a consistency of form and content; freely interpretable by anyone. The collective often repeats that their art-making takes on meaning in the performance of participatory and public artistic gestures; traversable, using a concept by philosopher Giorgio Agamben, by a multitude of “any singularities”. In this case, then, the message echoes the Book of Job’s verse “Mine eyes have seen thee.”, on which, as we now know, the entire conception of the Pavilion rests. The inmates explain to us that those words, placed there with grace, right inside the prison walls, give them relief: they are a bit like a caress. We are with you in the night, it is written on the wall; it means that out there is someone who does not forget those who live in prison. Every time that declaration of closeness, and of affection without judgment, takes on color by breaking through the darkness, the anguish and heaviness of thoughts are alleviated; and the emotion that that light unleashes is a good thing, the inmates tell us.
From the Corte del Passeggio we enter the room intended for the inmates to meet with their children and family members. The set up is the work of the inmates. This room is beautiful. It is like being in a kind of bubble; wrapped in a soft sky-blue where you live upside down in a welcoming place without sharp edges. Then we begin to focus on the place that contains us and the walls come to life. Hands, mouths, bodies, women upside down, rosaries, trees, leaves, candles, little lights hanging from the branches of a tree: a party, perhaps; and a little angel: next to him the words fortune, and mother. Two smiling guards recall the valets of royal palaces. Two more smiling guards are drawn on either side of the French window through which you enter another courtyard. A courtyard of colorful slides and swings, a few benches, sturdy trees that provide shade; and a scent of maritime pine needles that gets into your nose. It is the space where children and family members hug, and I imagine that the guards’ duty to control is tempered by the emotions of the girls and women. But, to remind us that we are in a prison, therefore limited in our ability to move, are the guards, whether drawn or real.

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During our visit, always, a heavy door closed behind us as soon as we walked towards another place. And another door was opened for us, granting us access. So that blue room is beautiful, very beautiful, and the impressions I had entering it are obviously not comparable to life in prison, of which one prisoner says “Here everyone eats, if you are sick they put a hand on your shoulder to make you sink […]. You have to deal with your limits and your weaknesses. There is no privacy in this hell disguised as justice”. In one of these passageways there is the only window in the prison without bars; the only one that can be opened: from there you can see the vegetable garden that they cultivate, the other fruit trees and flowers, which in addition to adding color to the grayness of the building, are used in the cosmetics laboratory. It is precisely here, one of them tells us, when they look out the window, that they sometimes feel like they are at home. I’ve been thinking about patience/of ordinary things, […]/And what is more generous than a window?

We enter an empty space, but although empty, it reminds us of a room in a house because the walls are covered with light wood panels and one of these is covered with a picture gallery. If they were not paintings they could be photographs; the family photographs that in some houses are found at the entrance or along the stairs that lead to the upper floor, or in the living room. The inmate lecturers explain to us that the French painter Claire Tabouret created those portraits inspired by the photographs that each of them showed her. The soft and delicate colors convey their warmth and intensity. It has not always been easy, especially emotionally, to search for the photographs, and choose the one that more than others concentrated a significant memory and an identity. The paintings revivify the moments captured by the photographs; each portrait is the result of a mutual trust between Tabouret and the inmates: an exchange and sharing of suggestions around the stories of the inhabitants of Giudecca. One of the two lecturers points out a little girl: it is her daughter. Hesitantly, the other lecturer points out a boy with curls: it is her son. We enter a deconsecrated church filled with the smell of wax and incense. The light, sad and faded, converges in the center. The wooden floor and the semi-square plan make it similar to a theater stall without seats. The space is empty, without benches. The shape of the balconies recalls theater boxes with wings at the sides. Sinfonia is composed of fabric sculptures created by the Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes together with the inmates: Thirty-five textile sculptures descend from the ceiling: the fabrics – cotton, silk, acrylic, poor or precious, single-colored or multi-colored – are wrapped around themselves like lianas or thick colored ropes. The fabrics used were clothes, or anything else, that belonged to someone because Gomes wants them lived and imbued with life. Inside the church, a melody, composed by the Brazilian guitarist Plinio Fernandez, spreads, interrupting itself at times; the rhythm accompanies the spaces delimited by the textile sculptures. The church is dedicated to Mary Magdalene, who sinned but was forgiven; we read her story, a symbol of the possibility of redemption, inside two rose windows in the center of two opposing walls. As our guides tell us, the sculptures that float between the two rose windows ideally connect the punishment with the possibility of living another life. The peculiarity of this place favors the dual position of spectators and actors. The waving works never cease to make us actors of the fantasies they trigger; probably immediately after having been spectators , amazed, and perhaps enchanted. The inmates never wanted to come here; I think this empty and dimly lit place was disturbing. Now it’s different: one of the two inmates tells us that to her, those twisted fabrics swinging from the ceiling, recall her tense body with her head pointing downwards, beyond the bars, when she tries to look out. The other inmate tells us that some of their companions really like these textile sculptures because they invite you to look up: they are cocoons ready to turn into butterflies; a bit like them. The non-pavilion of the Holy See presents itself as an ‘unprecedented and new reality’, say the curators; almost certainly the creation of a work of this type was possible because the Giudecca Prison is defined as a virtuous example. Of course there are others in Italy, but the data from the Associations that monitor the situation of prisons say that there have already been 642 suicides since the beginning of 2024. These data always strike me, for this reason I wanted to see the work of the Holy See at the Venice Biennale. Then it happened, a few weeks before the press conference to present the Pavilion, that a 27-year-old boy, an Italian rapper, hanged himself in his cell. He was a friend of my nephew, who works in that environment. A few years ago I happened to see Jordan burying his face in the cream of his birthday cake. I saw him for less than a minute but that face smeared with cream, and him laughing wildly and hugging the dog, continually comes to mind when I imagine him lifeless with a sheet around his neck. He ended up in prison – several times – because he had committed crimes. He was certainly a fragile boy, with a life full of stumbles behind him; if he lowered his tough mask he would say he was depressed. In prison, the last time he was there, he had reported having been molested; he had written a letter to his father begging him to make sure he could get house arrest; Some say he would have escaped from house arrest as he had already done; and that type of death, in some way, was always planned. I instead say, along with many of his other friends, that we cannot know: the only certainty we have is that Jordan Tinti died within the walls of an institution of a democratic country; that, according to our Constitution, should have taken care of him. But he was left alone. Reflecting therefore on the creation of the Holy See in Giudecca, the beauty of what was possible to achieve, in an active prison, clashes even more compared to the degradation and state of abandonment in which the inmates of too many Italian prisons survive. That the Holy See is concerned with giving voice to fragility is both a revolutionary and obvious act.Obvious, because dealing with the so-called fallen is its reason for being, revolutionary before becoming obvious; but it takes on a further revolutionary connotation for two reasons: for the expressive mode adopted and because this multifaceted dialogue stands out above the flatness of the indifference of the institutions and of most of the media. The curators explain that the reality of the Holy See Pavilion is the result of an energy that challenges artistic and prison conventions. Challenging conventions: that is exactly what they say. The challenge cannot be traced back to political categories, as strong as the temptation is, but it can be traced back, if we want to find a root for it, to the rediscovery and therefore to the human and imperfect adhesion to the only word that so distinguishes this Papacy (human and imperfect), that word is Gospel. This word, whose fundamental trait is compassion, which requires commitment, is addressed to everyone, even to my secular sensitivity unfolding in this prison through this exhibition. The disruptive work that we see and experience does much more than raise awareness: It insinuates itself into a way of living that despite almost never having anything educational about it; in its challenge to conventions shows that it is possible to inhabit the prison rather than being locked up within its walls. In Giudecca a difficult and radical choice was made, considering the place where everything is held together by written and unwritten rules. The curator Bruno Racine explained that “It was necessary to choose a place that had a meaning. The idea was that the place was a message and attention – according to what the Pope says – must be paid to those who are separated from society. It is not just about seeing, it is about sharing a shocking experience. Every visitor has a message to transmit after the visit”. In fact this prison is no longer a mere container of individuals but is transformed into a sounding board for emotions, which make us more open, more malleable, less closed. The works are charged with effectiveness not because they are exhibited but through human relationships: between the inmates and the artists, between us and the inmates and the artists, between us and the people we will meet outside of here. Then the introspective movement, the connections, the flows of creative thought – merge in the moment of presentation, which is an equally creative gesture. But it cannot be accomplished if we are not all there. The curators and artists explain that “The Holy See Pavilion establishes itself as a place of life and encounter, a cosmos where artistic and social norms are reinterpreted, representing a heterotopia that reflects and subverts traditional spaces.” In a heterotopia, in the Foucaultian sense of spatial organization that incorporates and reveals the network of relationships that intersect it, there is never anything static; it is the dynamics of human interactions that question and contradict what in those spaces appeared as order. It may be just my impression, but I would like to underline that I felt the element of disruption very strongly in the way the works were shown, as well as in the works themselves, both created in the manner of theatrical representation. It is another of the many possibilities of heterotopia – very intense – that was realized in Giudecca. After all, we entered and exited spaces that open and close almost as if they were curtains, places that seem to encompass backdrops and wings. Michel Foucault writes: “The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space.”

The prisoners become prisoners-lecturers; they wear a dress that invests them with that role: prisoners and lecturers. They are the ones who mark and distort the time and rhythm of the prison. Only they are permitted to say and think what until that moment, perhaps, was unthinkable. And I would say more: I was part of a staging, or of what was prepared in the previous months and of what actually went on stage; The film, for example. The lava plaques: illuminated by the poems and colors of the inmates’ thoughts; they are a real presentation; the silk- screens by Corita Kent hanging in a cafeteria that looks like a stage set; the portraits made from the inmates’ photographs: hanging in a place that takes on the appearance of a room in a house. The textile sculptures: located in a space that can be considered a theater, they in turn evoke images that could potentially be represented. The blue room of the meetings with the family members, where everything happens as if the inmates were on a stage. The textile sculptures: located in a space that can be considered a theater, they in turn evoke images that could potentially be represented. But the involvement of the inmates was noticeable even as they showed us the works they had not actually collaborated on. I think of the works of the Claire Fontaine Collective, or of Maurizio Cattelan, whose warmth and intensity imply a special dialogue and knowledge between these artists and the women of Giudecca. Continuously – as I imagine has been the case during the months of the Pavilion’s creation – breaking points with respect to what has been established has been produced. An example: during the route the inmate lecturers have a written text to follow; but the more the group blends together, the more often they deviate from that text; almost surprised by how much that slippage reveals to them. The inmates’ guide strips the works, the place, and the inmates themselves, of any attribution of meaning other than that emanating from the women inmates in the prison. In that moment nothing is truer than what we see despite, or thanks to, the staging. Sonia Gomes, who worked with the inmates to create the textile sculptures, says she saw a transformation in them, as if they were poets of a new reality. This movement of deciphering reality that redefines and reorients the gaze, giving life to a sort of lightning and primacy, does not end. It continues to generate itself, surpass itself and spread endlessly.

During our visit, Giulia read us one of her reflections: “The Biennale has given us the opportunity for once to be protagonists and no longer just spectators who lose their rights. We have been extras, poets, writers: even if we are delinquents, we are not the last. Thank you for making us free even for just an instant”. What I saw is immeasurable.

Through My Eyes
Commissioner: His Eminence Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça,
Curators: Chiara Parisi and Bruno Racine
Artists: Maurizio Cattelan, Bintou Dembélé, Simone Fattal, Claire Fontaine, Sonia Gomes, Corita Kent, Marco Perego & Zoe Saldana, Claire Tabouret Conversations: Hans Ulrich Obrist
Production: COR arquitectos and Flavia Chiavaroli