One of our first artist´s talks was hold by Claudia Vitari who is a well established Italian artist based in Berlin. During her studies at University of Art and Design in Halle she mastered various techniques in drawings. Claudia told us about her development as an artist and I have chosen one project that has caught my eye. In this project Claudia´s drawing skills were turned into an icebreaker. Claudia is a storyteller and while the artist was sketching the models, she also listened to their stories. Some people are more willing to share their life story then the others.
In her projects titled PERCORSOGALERA, 2009, the participants willingly shared their stories. It took a place in a county jail of Turin. The prisoners took a great interest in her artwork because they saw the artist as the only one who was unbiased and that made them even more willing to share the stories about their troubled lives. The projects was financed by Grant of Piedmont Region.
Before Claudia started her project in the prison, she did very intensive research and not only did she focus her attention on an attribute of confinement but Claudia also took into a consideration the effects on those who were placed in the confinement. A tool helping her to understand it, was thebook of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault. This book investigated history of confinement. His findings helped her to get better grasp how the prisons became a such influential institution whose power actually rivaled to the power of the king or church. Further the book discussed the reasons of placement in such institutions eg. unemployment and morality of such places. Another area of the artists´research was the actual construction structure of the prisons in general. These panopticon style buildings have circular floor plans with a watch tower in the middle. The person located in the tower can watch the whole diameter of in-build prison cells.
Once the preliminary research was done Claudia approached the local prison where she exhibited the outcome at the end of her project. Apart from drawing the artist´s medium is glass as reminiscent that we are all fragile and irreplaceable. Once broken and shuttered on thousands little pieces it cannot be put back. However, for the security reasons it was not possible to used the glass in the prison, so Claudia switched just this once to epoxy resin. The resin in its final form hold a very strong resemblance to glass. During many hours spent in sitting sessions drawing portraits of the inmates and building relationships with them, Claudia came with a series of clustered portraits on a silkscreen embedded in tall rectangular upright stands framed in a black metal frame illuminated from the inside. The stands were placed directly in a corridor of the prison to symbolise a path in people’s life. One of the option to access Claudia´s exhibition was to book a ticket weeks in advance and the visitor would get a change to interact with the inmates who modelled for Claudia.
Overall this particular project served as a mirror of our society and the people from behind the bars.
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