All records were more or less broken, heights conquered, planets photographed, the habits and customs of remote peoples tried on like gloves. Really nothing is left but the prison and its inhabitants shrouded in mystery. From the moment that even ex-primitive peoples wear jeans and use plastic, the prison constitutes the last paleolithic or galeolithic , contemporary community.
It is the biggest living fossil existing out of time, a spatial pond in which time has stopped, like those science fiction stories in which dinasaurs cohabit with homo sapiens, a splinter of the past lodged in a body which itself remains ultra modern, the place of removal ,of contradiction.The existence of a community drags out that, for the most part, is not lost in who knows what tangle of rain forest, as in an ancestral plague. Instead, it is an invisible people lodged inside an enormous highly visible buildings placed right in the centre, or on the immediate outskirts, of our cities as a perenial reminder of how much, according to some, only torment can lead to
repentence. The prison is a huge black mysterious hole, ignominious, huge rubbish tip for living beings decreed by a world that at the same time claims to recycle paper, glass, metals, water, shit. But for man there is clearly less interest .
Perhaps our prisons are not that terrifying industry of violence presented by Hollywood, nor the updating of an impenetrable hardness in fortress style .Perhaps they are rather a ramshackle machine that operates non stop in a void, turning out individuals destined to remain in a cycle of utter futility. At bottom none of those who operate within the system are particularly proud of it, but the mechanism continues to function reproducing its own inertial inefficiency, incapable of generating a better model. So the signals of an opposite trend, directed to informing the world of the difficulty, to bringing it to a meeting with "normality", find a hearing in many initiatives born in prison. Some examples: in Milan the Gran Serraglio Co-operative,led by Alessandro Guerriero, has set up carpentry and leather workshops that have worked on projects of well known designers, making valuable safes and bags in exchange for life; in the female wing of San Vittore there is the Co-opertiva Alice , run by Gigi Muti, a tailor atelier for T.V; which makes things for the RAI, La Scala and Mediaset; at Volterra a local theatrical group has now drawn the attention of experts to its work ; at Udine the "TSO" (Obligatory Health Treatment) is the first in a chain called "Buono da matti" with chef and patients in the kitchen; in Rome the "Sensibili alle foglie" co-operative in 1994 organised, on the initiative of Marina Zatta, Renato Curcio and Mia,an exhibition exchange between established artists and others just retired. The idea, however, is not to resolve the problems of the prison population by introducing an idyllic world of painters and poets,. Creativity is nothing but the expression of a desire, the sign of the possibility of chanelling human resources in directions different from those of the penal code. The choice is not between making pictures and committing crimes, but between the waste of voids to lose and the re-using of primary unsubstitutable materials.
In 1995 the Assessore alla cultura del comune di Roma , Gianni Borgna, and Giovanna Pugliese of Arci-Solodarità, asked me to go into the Rebibbia Prison to set up a workshop . Immediately I thought of how little art came into it with such restricting conditions , and suffering. My normal attitude in face of creativity and institutions is jokes, ridicule, and it seemed frankly difficult to manage to take things lightly, especially with people who found themselves in existential conditions heavier than could be imagined. But it was the meeting with Valerio Fioravanti and Francesca Mambro that banished every doubt. They explained to me that even this, their, was life; And how in every life there existed different facets, shadings, degrees of suffering, moments of desperation and flashes of hope and, though predominant, the sphere of pain could leave some room for play and surprise.It was necessay above all to try; And that is what we did. On the other hand, "carcere"( prison) is the anagram
of "cercare" (try). The initial idea was to check the premise of the historic avant guarde (futurism, dadaism, surrealism) that from at start of the century had theorised about the need to inject into the sick body of western art the wild values of primitiveness, of folly, of dream. From Futurism on, art wished to be anti-academic , non scholastic, ignorant, insufferant of every rule and dictate, ungracious .It had to do with the ugly, to prefer the lived life to the canons of beauty of classical culture, put the intention of the author before that of the completed work, the "movement" in its multiplicity before the masterpiece of a single genius; What was there, therefore, better than a prison to verify the rightness of these assumptions? A project with which to develope an artistic course wholly open and at the same time linked to the traditonal avant guarde. Our ism, was Gattabuism. At the beginning there were various definitions: Galerismo, Artisti Associati (perforce), but gattabuismo was linked to the imaginary comic, faery tale, of the infant world , here chosen as the most appropriate for a group ;of adults being punished, who were forbidden even to use scissors, a problem for the composition of a collage. What, however, they wanted from us was that we should produce something exportable to the outside world, a visible object that demonstrated to the rest of the city that the prison is not a body separate from society, un stagnant pond in which undesirables disdappear from sight. We had to make visible the invisible. I believe we may have succeeded in constructing what was desired -- a machine that has launched signals, even if only weak little waves , that could gradually cause the walls to crumble . And not only the tangible ones, which prevent communication between human beings. Beyond the exhibition that was held in the summer of '96 in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni di Roma (gattabuismo), with detainees of the female wing, we have produced an official Poster of the Comune for Women'sDay (gale 8 was march) and the calender Arci for '97 (Calendaria), Fioravanti and we have recounted the story in Rebibbia Rhapsody (Ed; Stampa Alternativa, postfazione di Luigi Mancini) and written another booklet on the prison (The Return of Silvio Pellico, Pub. Stampa Alternativa). We have produced, with the help of Francesca d'Aloja, a film, Silvio Pellico -la (Piccolo ergastoli), produced and transmitted in RAI 2 in prime viewing time, 4 september I997 and presented at the Cinema festival of Venice and in an audiovisual at Biarritz in 1998. With Lorenzo Spezzano we have prepared a series of written, illustrated manifestos on the conditions of those who, for petty offences, have passed the greater part of their lives behind bars, condemned to sentences much heavier than those of a serial killer. In most gatta buisti have animated a workshop of ceramics and to an intense production of (E/.vast), vases in the shape of the letter "E", holed vases wasted as are wasted the existences of those who are live in reclusion, unable to recreate a texture of relationships with the world and with those near and dear to them; But gattabuism has not been a creative activity , a lucid therapy, an employment of free time. Rather, it is a proposal that can, and must, pass the confines of prison walls. It has been a bet, a virus that must infect with doubt , overturn and remix all certainties, all separatenesses. Inspite of everything, it has been optimism, the attempt to light a crime from which all have prudently held back, and that instead, as long as it exists, it should be a fixed goal, not of voyeur curiosity, but of passionate concern to find a solution that speeds up its extinction. Locking people up does not serve much purpose, does not move a comma in the social emergency . What is necessary is to bring them back into life instead of excluding them from it.
