Savage Flowers

About roughly 130 men are imprisoned in the Detention Center of Casabianda, Corsica. Most of them were convicted of child abuse. The inmates spend their last few years of imprisonment working the fields of this wide agricultural domain.

January 2011 : the revolution bursts in Tunisia, my father’s country. The Tunisian people scream in a rage and I, here in Paris, can feel their revolt vibrating in my heart.

Open a door. Handle a crisis. Write an incident report. At France’s prison officer academy, hundreds of men and women learn to become prison guards. Their words begin to mirror the institution. Their movements sharpen. What once felt uncertain becomes routine. Doubt slowly fades from their faces.

Scratches. Cross-outs. Stripes. Arnaud is tirelessly attacking ancient masters' painting reproductions with the tip of his pen. His free and living interlaces highlight shapes and figures.

Since 1987, the anthropologist Pierre-Jacques Dusseau, who works in prisons, has collected objects made by detainees. Refused by museums of ethnography, these everyday objects and artistic creations are gathering dust in his attic. Each one has a story that sheds a different light on penal institutions – and these stories, no one tells them better than Pierre-Jacques.