THE PRISON OF SANTO STEFANO, BY ROSELLA BISCOTTI

In The Prison of Santo Stefano (2011-2013), her work exhibited in the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Biscotti reflects on the general condition experienced by detainees and the psychological effects of isolation, which destroy physical and intellectual abilities and annul the convicts’ identities.

The Santo Stefano Prison is located on a small island on the Mediterranean Sea. It was the first prison built for life imprisonment in Italy and the first one to use a panoptic structure, taking as reference the San Carlo Opera Theater in Naples. Contemporary to Jeremy Bentham’s designs of the Panopticon, this structure renders all cells visible from a central point, thus creating a permanent feeling of surveillance. Santo Stefano opened its doors as a modern prison in 1793 and was operational until 1965. Many political figures in Italy—mostly anarchists and communist leaders— were imprisoned at this location.

In The Prison of Santo Stefano Biscotti produced imprints of spatial segments of the prison’s floors with lead sheets and filmed the process with 8 mm footage. This process —the carrying of the raw material to the island by hand, hammering and reshaping it, and taking it back to the mainland— symbolizes the prison’s existential conditions on many levels: it recalls the hard physical labour involved, represents the permanent marks the prison could leave on the body, and evokes a concrete sensation of the prison’s spatial restrictions through the sculptures shown as full-scale maps of one cell and a fragment of the courtyard. Biscotti is after the traces of the bodies who lived inside and capturing their resistance through fragility. In the film, the making of the sculptures is accompanied by a political action (‘Bringing flowers to the cemetery of the detainees that died in life imprisonment’) that was initiated by the artist and Nicola Valentino—former political prisoner with a life sentence—and supported by detainees of different Italian prisons. During 2012 and 2013, the unmarked graves of the island’s cemetery were named thanks to a map drawn by an anarchist that had visited the island shortly after the prison’s closure, and the action grew into the movement Liberi dall’ergastolo (‘Free from life imprisonment’).

Javier Villa and Övül Durmuşoğlu