PhotoEspaña X Festival Internacional de Fotografía y Artes Visuales Madrid Espagne
PHOTOESPAÑA 2010 : Sala del Complejo El Aguila, 28014 - Madrid
The crowded situation in jails, the bad condition in health and hygiene, the non coherence amongst the convicts, and the State’s inability to keep imprisonment model with minimal conditions to recover the prisoners and its social reinsertion, put public security on a daily recently disclosed by prisoners organizations attacks (PCC) in São Paulo – just like the many other reasons which take thousands of men and women to jail – exposure to violence, trouble to access health care, education, culture, justice and leisure. The prisoners stigma completes the panorama, exalting its corruption, stimulating criminality, its reincidence and, mainly, maintaining prejudice. This issue deals with urgent reality which surpass us and its our responsibility. A small with a convict and another reality is show. The sentence “any man can be guilt” coming out in the speech of one convicts, one of the first man I had the opportunity to talk to at Apac from Itaúna was the door to entry my will to understand that world.
The project was developed in the prisons Apac (Association of Protection and Assistance for the Convicts) in Brazil. In the Apac, they don't have guards, the prisoners are the responsible for the prisons. After more than eight years living in the universe of the prisons, I had become a privileged observer, and eventually a participant observer. In 2009, I obtained permission from the Criminal Court, to sleep for six nights with 33 inmates. An experience allowed me to finally reach the point maximum work: the intimacy of the inmates: The poetic presented in photographs. For which porosities and sieves, the voices, the gestures, the silences, cross the invisible wall what separates those men of us? After all, that lives, that bodies, that dreams, and are thoughts woven there, where don't the eyes reach? The movements that cross these men, that draw the everyday of those marked by a past of marginality, the assay to build a new look are the results of this project. Men, through the Apac Method, glimmer the possibility of acting in a society where, at least, all have the right to talk, but mostly are speechless.
INSERTION is distinguished by its unpublishement, for presenting its images of actors from a different reinstatement and has as basis a Method that intends to reinvent the penitentiary model in Brazil and abroad. Create a historical and artistic document, a new offer for the Brazilian carcerary system through the daily register of the condemned Method Apac is to reduce the obstacle which separate us from these excluded men and women. Stories and considering hearing to what indicated to be an anthology. Frequent visits had to happened to realize that those images seeked my view – attempt to know a new reality. Equipped only with a camera and the wish to go beyond the obstacles tat separates our worlds. I came to realize the wishes and dreams common to them all and how important is freedom in our lives.
The arrest of APAC model was designed by Brazilian lawyer Mario Ottoboni and first implemented in 1972 in Sao Jose dos Campos, State of Sao Paulo. According to its idealization, the method combines features of socialization in the prison environment in order to achieve desirable effects of social reintegration of prisoners and prevent recidivism. To date, there are over 100 units APAC in Brazil, mainly in the Minas Gerais State. The method has also been "exported" to Germany, Bulgaria, Singapore, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Slovakia, United States, England, Wales, Honduras, Latvia, Malawi, México, among others.