RI-SCATTI, the exhibition chronicling the harsh world of prisons, returns to the PAC in Milan

From Oct. 9 to Nov. 6, 2022, for the eighth consecutive year, RI-SCATTI, the project conceived and organized by the PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan and Ri-scatti Onlus, the voluntary association that has been creating events and initiatives for social redemption through photography since 2014, returns. and promoted by the City of Milan with the support of Tod’s. The new edition, curated by Diego Sileo, sponsored by the Ministry of Justice and carried out in collaboration with the Milan Polytechnic and the Lombardy Regional Superintendent’s Office of the Department of Prison Administration, aims to recount the complexities, difficulties, but also opportunities of life in correctional institutions, beyond simplifications and stigmatizations, providing participants with an educational tool and also generating a constructive comparison and concrete synergy between the city administration, the penitentiary administration and Milan’s cultural institutions.

This year the absolute protagonists were the inmates and prison police officers from Milan’s four detention institutions: Opera Detention Home, Bollate Detention Home, F. Di Cataldo Prison, IPM C. Beccaria. Eleven months of course, one hundred participants (of which sixty inmates and forty police officers), more than 50,000 photographic shots taken, 800 of which were selected to be exhibited, and unpublished and exclusive video materials to tell the reality of prisons from the direct point of view of those who live in them and those who live them for work.

The exhibition at PAC that concludes the educational project is, as always, free admission. Given the exceptional nature of the event, the exhibition extends in duration for an entire month and opens to the city on Saturday, Oct. 8 from 7:30 p.m. until 11:30 p.m. on the occasion of the 18th Day of the Contemporary, promoted by AMACI Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums to tell the story of the vitality of contemporary art in our country. All photos (printed by FDF Fotolaboratorio Digital Service on Canon Photo Paper Pro Luster 260 gr. paper) and the catalog are for sale, and all proceeds will go to support and finance architectural interventions aimed at improving the quality of life in prisons.

These activities will be managed and coordinated by the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies of the Politecnico di Milano, which, together with the Department of Design, has been conducting participatory research in prison spaces for many years. A path never before tackled by anyone else, which had as an absolute novelty for the inmates the possibility of having cameras at their disposal in the wards and cells, and for the police officers the possibility of having them at their disposal during their working hours.

The result is an intense account of prison, a world that is difficult to understand, unknown to those who do not live there and to those who do not live there. For those who do not cross that threshold that marks the dividing line between living and surviving, between time passing and the immutability of days. What is important in our daily lives often becomes meaningless in prison sections, and what is vital behind bars is almost meaningless to us. Prisons are not only crowded with inmates, they are crowded with human beings who cannot be left alone, who must be helped to save themselves from their own “lost life,” from their belief that they no longer have any chance of redemption, from their vision of the “disappearance of the future” linked to relationships radically flattened on past action. Entry into prison represents the beginning of a descent, tortuous and inevitably harsh. It is the beginning of a journey, full of pain, difficulties, fears and contradictions, where one suffers deep loneliness despite being together with other people, where there are professionals who can help, but it is really very easy to feel abandoned. A path that, in the interest of the community as well, should end with an exit “to see the stars again” (whether physical or symbolic for those who actually will never leave prison), so that the desire for justice does not turn into revenge.

And then, in this photographic narrative, there are also prison officers. Right from the start, it seemed interesting to involve those who work inside the prison in the project, those who wear a uniform and firmly believe in what they do, whether by vocation, life choice or because they simply found themselves doing it. Often mistreated, ill-judged, considered a list of anonymous numbers, swallowed up by the vortex of catchphrases, prejudices, and clichés about law enforcement, and which then unfortunately sometimes (as the news reminds us) also turn out to be frighteningly true, throwing the entire category into disrepute. Inside the corridors and sections, with the days punctuated by guard duty, the routine beating of bars, keys turning, commands to be executed, opening and closing of blinds, counting rounds, handovers, night shifts, stakeouts, court escorts. All in the name of rigor, vigilance and control, to observe, to scrutinize, to intuit the reasons behind every single attitude, every half-said sentence, and to foresee every possible and possible risk behind a movement.

This year’s RI-SCATTI was therefore developed through a dual path, common between the two sides much more than one might think, where at the center of everything was man with his nuances, his mistakes, his weaknesses, his frailties, his courage, his responsibilities.

Completing the exhibition is the Laboratorio Carcere Project Room, dedicated to the research path that Politecnico di Milano has been conducting in the field since 2014 in Milan’s penitentiary institutions. The in-depth study documents the activity of investigating and designing the form of space and ways of inhabiting it, with the goal of change and under the banner of cooperation between the world of research and the world of punishment.

“The PAC continues to courageously investigate with an unprecedented photographic gaze the most difficult and complex realities of our present,” said Culture Councillor Tommaso Sacchi. “Behind this gaze, which in the exhibition also becomes our own, we can discover worlds unknown to us, even if not at all distant, and understand a lived experience other than ourselves. In any exhibition, in fact, we become part of an artist’s universe of thought and suggestion, but in this project, now in its eighth edition, there is more: there is the will to delve into particular lived experiences, teaching people how to represent themselves, how to give their daily lives the sense of a life lived fully, albeit in a different way than that which flows with other rhythms and other codes outside the prison walls. And there is also the desire to never stop at the surface of things and the frames that define them-a fundamental goal for those who are concerned with representing the contemporary.”

"This edition of RI-SCATTI," stresses Stefano Corso, president of RI-SCATTI, “has carried out an uncomfortable, difficult social project, but one in which the term ’redemption’ is deeply connected to the gaze of those who narrate. ’Redemption’ for those who have made mistakes, ’redemption’ for those who work without the recognition of society. It has been an intense eleven months of work in which our teachers have engaged with people of different ages and genders by making them the protagonists of the story of their existence in Milan’s prisons. The environments and relationships in which they live are their narrative, and very often it becomes difficult to distinguish where the point of view belongs, making it difficult to distinguish between those who live and work in prisons. A series of raw and touching photographs that open us a glimpse between those walls from which a reality leaks out without the filters often stereotyped by common feeling, which pretends to imagine lives without wanting to recognize them and ignores the limits of dignity and humanity despite knowing them.”

RI-SCATTI, the exhibition chronicling the harsh world of prisons, returns to the PAC in Milan

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