From Trudu to Princesa, art beyond bars

A gigantic black eye, a cold gaze. Spots of color around, without disturbing its fixity. Beyond the bars of the Rebibbia prison, Domenico Giglio thus paints the eye of the caretaker who keeps the prisoner under constant surveillance. As a recluse, he relies on canvases and brushes to express what he has inside. He also uses the cell sheet. Large and fragile: the fire, set in protest by the prisoner himself, gnaws a portion of the cloth, however, giving an inimitable touch to the work. That sheet is displayed on a wall of the "Sa bena" cultural club, in the center of Nuoro, in an unusual exhibition, which has continued until recent days and promoted by the ScartaBellArte association. It is called “Vital Resources”, it brings together expressive forms of imprisonment, be it that of prison, reformers or judicial asylums. Thrilling stories: souls damned in life draw images that refer to hellish circles, they are a dramatic and merciless mirror. Each work tells a load of pain, a whirlwind of feelings to take your breath away. All are kept in the archive of writings, inscriptions and ir-ritated art of the “Sensibili alle leaves” cooperative. A very vast collection, which has been going on for decades, to draw on to propose ever new exhibitions on art that has taken root beyond bars.

The colors vent the anger of stormy lives and bring out survival paths, not always successful. The eye is a recurring image not only in the art of Giglio, inmate from Campania who passed to the Red Brigades, behind him murders and kidnappings, imprisoned in the 1980s in the Badu 'e Carros prison in Nuoro. In the cell he gives vent to days that are always the same by throwing himself into artistic research. His works bear the initials Giglio 9999, a number that signifies the end of the penalty never. He continues his pictorial activity out of prison, now he is a successful artist.

The eye is also a symbolic image for Stefano Bombaci, who spent the Eighties in special prisons: it shows perennial surveillance, the most mortifying condition of every recluse. So does Mario Trudu, a native of Arzana, who died in 2019 in the Oristano hospital after 41 years of detention. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for two kidnappings that ended badly. Art becomes for him the only breath of fresh air. In his graphic narration Trudu traces a blind eye, without iris or pupil. It tells about the fears that revolve around the life of a lifer. Among the many drawings he traces the irons on the wrists, he defines them as "torture tools of the period of the inquisition". "I have been a victim of it for over a decade," he notes in the drawing made in 2015 in the San Gimignano prison.

Fernando Eros Caro is the author of a work where death dominates: a skeleton appears covered by a black cloak with a hood. He is holding an hourglass in his hand. Strong image, like its story. Indigenous Yaqui-Aztec born in 1949 in Southern California, since 1981 he has been imprisoned on death row at San Quentin prison. On January 28, 2017 he was found dead in his cell: death from heart attack, according to the medical certificate. He spends 35 years in a narrow space, in perennial agony. He said: "You can live, you can die, but no one should live waiting to die."

Franca Settembrini, born in Florence in 1947, was eleven years old when she ended up in the San Salvi psychiatric hospital in Tuscany, where she attended the atelier “La tinaia”. Then he arrives in the judicial asylum of Castiglione delle Stiviere, in Mantua, where he continues to paint until his death in 2003. His works are full of color, strong and tenacious brushstrokes, expression of the lightest moments in the middle of an existence full of travails. .

Among the drawings, inside a display case, there are pages written in block letters. They bear the date of 16-9-91. These are the notes of Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque, author with the former Brigadier Maurizio Jannelli of the book Princesa. The story of the Brazilian transgender inspires the famous song Princesa by Fabrizio De Andrè. She starts writing in a Rebibbia cell. She retraces her history, her transsexual life, the streets of prostitution, the metamorphosis of her body. Giovanni Tamponi, also detained in the Roman prison, encourages her to tell about her torments so as not to throw herself to the ground. So he acts as an intermediary with Jannelli until he makes them meet in the prison church where a solidarity writing process matures. The result is a book. That is not enough for Fernanda, nor is it enough to leave prison: she suicides a few years later.

"Documenting the creative resources that inmates use to survive within total institutions, exhibiting the works of the exhibition" Vital Resources "- explain the organizers - has the dual function of putting the person at the center, on the one hand, and of constitute an effective analyzer of the institution from which those works come from the other. Putting the person at the center means not de-humanizing whoever is in prison, not monsterrificing him, not making him coincide with his crime or his diagnosis ».