The National Demonstration of Prison Art "Beyond the wall of Dream" has been, for voluntary organizations and those of social cooperation working in the ambit of prisons, a particularly interesting experience. It has high-lighted their operative and collaborative capacities in work of comparison and research on common ground.
The idea, born in a place of isolation and suffering like a prison, has seen participation and involvement "without frontiers", whether cultural, religious, idealistic, or social, of many detainees and many structures of voluntary organisations, lay and catholic, personalities of the artistic world, intellectuals, film directors, actors, writers, musicians, and those in politics and institutions;
The meeting of forces, of a wide range, representative of Italy today, that of this new millenium, oriented towards development, participation, autonomy and solidarity; a terrain on which, we believe, the future will be constructed.
The meeting through various artistic works, paintings, poetry, narrative, theatre, music, photography and handicrafts has represented a world of nostalgia and discomforts but also of hopes for the future, hastestified and in some way summed up the sense of life in prison. It has been a place of winess for many detainees who, if only for one day, have been made interpreters of a meeting of personal promotion which has served to catalyse the interest of the public and the press, and to canalise in the collective image another idea of prison.
We volunteers and social workers who are in daily contact with the difficulties that detainees live, have wished, through a year's work, to record their unease and desires, their expectations and difficulties, carrying outside and in some way representing them
Through the language of art less cold and socialised than that of rules and articles of law, perhaps closer to the way of feeling and living of common people.
But we wanted also to speak of prison in a different way than usual to allow the outside world a contact with the intimacy of those who, deprived of liberty, live a daily existence cadenced by ill being, by lack of prospects and sense of futility.
In this context has acquired a value not only aesthetic but educative, communicatice
And solidarity inclined, of mediation between different areas of life today, although diverse, the can go together to define a profile of another sociality and another way of living together.
So art as an instrument of communication, of recognition, of awareness of liberty.
"When I am Hamlet I evade, I do not seem any more to be in prison" (Graziono Scialpi, detainee in a prison of Trieste).
In prison, in spite of the commitment of many who work there, it is evident how difficult it is to listen to the wishes of detainees and how the guardianship of human rights is too often only a principle still generic and abstract.
In spite of the frequent conferences and debates on Prisons and justice much remains to be done. From words and good proposals we must pass to concrete actions and actual commitments. We hope that this initiative will serve at least to provoke in free society a more aware emotion in respect of persons that commit crimes and a more penetrating and solidarity inclined logic that has no fear of facing evil to recognize and overcome it.
We believe that it has been important work for its characteristics and ideas diffused, to overcome indifference and hostility that is breathed out in front of persons detained. The demonstration, organised in the same period as World Jubilee Day of Prisons desired by the Church and thePope, has wished to add a profoundly spiritual of those who, even in the restricted circumstances of detention, long for conditions of life and work respectful of the rights of the person.
The demonstration has involved all the Provveditoriali Regionali and the Direzioni delle carceri del Ministero della Giustizia who have made come in about 200 articles of craftsmanship , 600 paintings and sculptures, 150 theatrical peformances, 50 video films and short films ideated by detainees, 500 poems, 400 titles of books, 10 musicals.
For the visual arts sector, theatre, poetry, expert panels have been constituted formed to judge and award prizes to the best works:
Visual Arts -- Panel of experts "Beyond the Wall of Dream"
Poetry -- Eugenio Poetry Prize
Theatre -- Enrico MariaSalerno Prize, which instituted for 2000 a special
Prize for works entered for "Beyond the Wall of Dream"
To them, thanks for their availability, collaboration and the image they have been able to give to the demonstration.
We have lived the days of the manifestation with a mind open to criticisms and suggestions. In thanking all the persons that have committed themselves to the success of this initiative - a very long list in which there are, besides volunteers, detainees,
the personnel of prisons and in particular of the Dipartimento Amministrativo Penitenziaria della Giustizia , of the Lazio Region and of the Comune diu Roma -
we trust that together in other ways, forms an occasions such collaboration may
continue. This work is a further testimony of the commitment of all those who have constructed the initiative with the aim of reducing still more to reduce the separation
between "inside and outside" and to strengthen the feelings of solidarity between
human beings.
