Prison to Prison Catalogue (English Version)

Prison to Prison An intimate story between two architectures

Ministry of Education

University of the Republic

and Culture

Curators

Fieldwork Photography

Sergio Aldama

Agustín Fernández

Chancellor of University

Federico Colom

Minister of Education and Culture

of the Republic

Diego Morera

Invited Autors

Maria Julia Muñoz

Dr. Roberto Markarian

Jimena Ríos

Critical texts

Mauricio Wood

Natalia Agati

Undersecretary of

School of Architecture, Design

Education and Culture

and Urbanism

Edith Morares

Ethel Baraona Commissioner

Ángel Borrego

Alejandro Denes

Luis Camnitzer

Dean of School of Architecture,

Marcelo Danza

Secretary General Director

Design and Urbanism

Assistant Commissioner

Olimpia Fiorentino

Ana Gabriela Gonzalez

Arq. Marcelo Danza

Angélica Lazarimos

Andrés Jaque

National Director of Culture

Council of School of Architecture, Design and Urbanism

Experience Design

Matices Culturales

Juan Pablo Colasso, Marco Colasso

Hélio Meneses

head brothers

Serena Olcuire

Natalia Laino Sergio Mautone Director of Cultural Programs

Students Representatives Lucrecia Vespa

Luis Parodi Experience Content

Francesco Perrotta-Bosch

Florencia Lindner

Juan Miguel Petit

Matices Culturales

Daniel Zubillaga Puchot

Professors Representatives

Fabián Sarubbi

Rodrigo Rey

Minister of Foreign Affairs

Arq. Juan Carlos Apolo

Marco Colasso

Cesar Reyes Najera

Rodolfo Nin Novoa

Dra. Arq. Mercedes Medina

Juan Pablo Colasso

Angelina de los Santos

Begoña Ojeda Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Matías Marrero Sofía Ibarguren

Arq. Francesco Comerci

Enrique Walker

Undersecretary Ministry

Arq. Salvador Schelotto

Design Assistance

of Foreign Affairs

Arq. Fernando Rischewski

Bruno Baietto

Ariel Bergamino Secretary General Director Carlos Amorín

Critical images Martín Amande

Graduates Representatives Arq. Néstor Pereira Arq. Patricia Petit Arq. Alfredo Moreira

Administrative Director

Editorial Design Carolina Ocampo & Sofía Ganduglia

Harun Farocki Agustín Fernández Regina José Galindo

Poster Design Sebastián Lambert

Conor McGrady Antoni Muntadas Matías Nin

Hugo Caussade Typographies General Director of Cultural Affairs

Quiroga & Rambla

Omar Mesa

tipotype.com

Ambassador of Uruguay in Italy

Translations

Gastón Lasarte

Estudio de Traductores BBC (Texts pages:

Berna Reale Stanford Prison Experiment

78-81, 93-95, 96-97), Patricia Calcagno and

Uruguay Pavilion in Venice

Eduardo Wood (Text page: 71-72), Francisco

Enrique Aguerre

Díaz, Lucía Galaretto y Rayna Razmilic (Text

Cristina Bausero

page: 64-69), Raúl Chavez (Text page: 106-113)

Patricia Bentancur Fieldwork Assistance

Miguel Fascioli Silvia Listur

ISBN 978-9974-36-358-8

Cecilia Lombardo

Luis Oreggioni

© Aldama, Sergio; Colom Federico;

Cecilia Alamón

Ricardo Pascale

Morera, Diego; Ríos Jimena;

Bernardo Martín

Luis Zino

Wood, Mauricio; 2018

Natalia Laino

prisontoprison.uy

6,7,8, 9-21, 24-26, 30-36, 38-40, 44-49, 50-53, Association of Friends of the

Sponsors

Gabriela Dibarboure

Tania Odriozola

Elina Rodríguez

Uruguay Natural

Suci Dutra

Natalia Olij

Juan Andrés Rodríguez

Ana Lucía Álvarez

Tony Dutra

Virginia Olij

Francisco Sánchez Varela

Richard Aldama

Santiago Ferrando

Olivares De Casupá

Laura Sánchez

Inés Amorín

Mauro Fonticiella

Laura Passanante

Martina Seré

Olga Araujo

Gabriela Garrido

Liliana Palma

Emilio Silva

Carlos Arcos Ettlin

Alma Gil

Susana Palma

Franco Simini

Lucía Arzuaga

Graciela Gil

Teresita de Paula

Mercedes Sotelo

Rosario Asuaga

Irene Gil

Francesco Perrotta-Bosch

Virginia Sosa

Rafael Bega

Laura Gil

Laura Pérez

Cristina Stoppiello

Paula Berhau

Malena Gil

Rosario Pérez

Francois Tanner

Valeria Berhau

Xavier Gómez-Pantoja

Carla Raffo

Carolina Vignoli.

Mariela Boero

José Eduardo Iramendi

Andrés Raffo

Myriam Bustos

Ana Jones

Matías Radünz

Martín Cáceres

Agustina Laino

Carmen Ríos

Martín Cajade

LGD Arquitectos

Elena Ríos

Graciela Censato

Miguel Mengual

Gilberto Ríos

Raúl Chávez

Viviana Misurraco

Natalia Ríos

Micaela Cristobo

Martín Odriozola

Agustina Rodríguez

—

Special thanks

Eva Canel

Lúcia Koch

Natalia Ríos

Cecilia Alamon

Sonia Castro

Cecilia Lombardo

Fernando Rossi

Mayra Aldama

Raúl Chávez

Fernanda Lobo

Genaro Rossi

Richard Aldama

Colectivo Malambo

Florencia Martínez

Sara Rossi

Sebastián Alonso

Martín Cobas

MAPA Arquitectos

Robert Rossella

Martín Amande

Martín Craciún

Matices Culturales

Agustina Rodríguez

Carlos Arcos

Marcelo Danza

Hélio Meneses

Jackson Araújo

Leonardo Dasso

María José Milans

ATI Suffix

Francisco Díaz

Diego Moles

Markus Bader

María Elena Diena

Florencia Morera

Adrián Baraldo

Agustín Dieste

Nada Crece a la Sombra

Pablo Betancurt

Lucía Duclosson

Juan Ormaechea

Paula Berhau

Antje Ehmann

Luis Oreggioni

Valeria Berhau

Valeria España

Jorgelina Palma

Mary Yulka Bogisich

Miguel Fascioli

Luis Parodi

Fanny Bonandini

La Furgoneta

Personal Unidad n°6 de Punta de Rieles

Mario Bonandini

Laura Gil

Juan Miguel Petit

Lesley Tanner

Selva Braselli

Silvia Gil

Simone Pírez

Enrique Walker

Claudia Brasesco

Federico González

Andrés Raffo

Alicia Wood

Pedro Brito del Pino

Juan Herreros

Carla Raffo

Eduardo Wood Sr

Ariadna Cantis

Gustavo Hiriart

Raumlabor

Eduardo Wood Jr

Patricia Calcagno

Ana Juanche

Susana Regent

Guillermo Wood

Ana María Sánchez Laura Sánchez Claudia Sánchez Claudio Scarpa Fernando Sicco Equipo del EAC Franco Simini Carina Strata Gilberto Ríos

andrés jaque and enrique walker in conversation

106 How to escape from the videosurveillance box?

38

prison to prison

An intellectual (whose work is worth reading) is more necessairy than ever

prison to prison

73 An oficial sroty

subillaga + rey

30 Roundtable at Punta de Rieles prison

24

prison to prison

Prisons

francesco perrotta-bosch

37

facultad de arquitectura, diseño y urbanismo

conor mcgrady

Introduction

Enclosure architectures

7 p2p team

Prison Architect

27

marcelo danza

8

6

Presentation ministerio de educación y cultura

p2p team

Summary

70

prison to prison

Critical Memes

Hi, reader!

regina josé galindo

The first publicprivate partnership experience in prisons in Urugay

antoni muntadas

Fences

82

78

America´s family prison

Architecture as a political instrument

63

64

ángel borrego

99 Art and literacy luis camnitzer

92

Video surveillance

From rehabilitation to collective transformation

harun farocki

93

Prison images

An interview to Luis Parodi prison to prison

natalia laino

60

9

The [architecture] coming insurrection

Prison to Prison, an intimate story between two architectures

ethel baraona and cesar reyes najera

martín amande

50

Photography and situation

58

prison to prison

An interview to Juan Miguel Petit prison to prison

86

prison to prison

Disciplinary architecture

54

96

hélio menezes

41

philip zimbardo

Standford prison experiment

85

natalia agati, olimpia fiorentino, serena olcuire

The village-like prison from above

Prison?

A question instead of a statement

matías nin

44

agustín fernández

56

Light disappearance act

berna reale

98

angelina de los santos

Americano

83

The long laugh of all these years

Festival in the village

71

#presentation Ministerio de EducaciĂłn y Cultura

The National Direction of Culture of the Ministry of Education and Culture of Uruguay has the great honor of introducing Uruguay national participation at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

The theme suggested by the curators, architects Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, proposes to celebrate Freespace as architecture’s capacity to find unexpected generosity in each project, even within the most private, defensive, exclusive or commercially restricted conditions.

The work proposed by the team selected to represent Uruguay manages to crudely expose a reality in which architecture imposes extreme restrictions on life itself. Prison to Prison introduces a dialogue that goes beyond the intellectual construction of prison models. It proposes a reflection on human condition, culture creation, interpersonal relationships, roles, capacities, resilience and politics.

It also deals with creation and investigation processes and the production of critical thinking from an architectural standpoint, and is enriched by the collective construction of a team that gathers individuals from several fields.

A solid curatorial and logical proposal reveals an aesthetic approach that speaks very well of this new generation of architects committed with the challenges of their time. We are pleased to welcome them to our beloved Uruguay Pavilion in the Giardini of the Venice Biennale.

Sergio Mautone National Director of Culture

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#introduction Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo, Udelar

The International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale has turned into one of the most important events of international architectural culture. In the course of several months, a wide range of installations, exhibitions, lectures and publications condensing the state of the art of architecture at the global level, take place at the Giardini, the Arsenale and several venues scattered through Venetian canals.

For the last seven editions of the Venice Biennale, the Uruguayan Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC) has entrusted the School of Architecture, Design and Urbanism (FADU) of the University of the Republic with the organization and implementation of Uruguay national participation.

FADU organizes an open competition to select the curatorial proposal to be developed at the beautiful Pavilion Uruguay has enjoyed in the Giardini for several decades now. A prominent jury is responsible for granting the award. This uncommon situation reflects the power of institutions in this small South-American country, and the unique role in cultural construction played by its public and free University, organized under a shared-governance system.

For this new edition, MEC and FADU are working side by side.

MEC has appointed Alejandro Denes as commissioner of the exhibition, and FADU has selected, through an open competition, this edition’s young curatorial team, comprised of professionals, teachers and students of FADU, and also of friends and creatives, full of revolutionary ideas that make us dream of upcoming ways of understanding architecture and the city.

Each and every step has been highly stimulating, what makes us hope and expect that a solid collective cultural construction is possible, and encourages us to continue working in the same direction, with commitment and dedication.

The selected proposal is an interesting reflection on the notions of “freespace” suggested by the Biennale general curators, architects Yvonne Farrel and Shelley McNamra. The proposal exhorts us to look at profane architectural practices with an open mind, not losing our sense of wonder.

Marcelo Danza, architect Dean of the School of Architecture, Design and Urbanism

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01 Project “Una cárcel pueblo” selected at the internal competition “Proyectos de Extensión y Actividades en el Medio”, 2018 Edition, held at the School of Architecture, Design and Urbanism of the University of the Republic.

02 George Didi-Huberman in Harun Farocki, Desconfiar de las Imágenes. Buenos Aires, Caja Negra, 2015.

03 Hito Steyerl, The Institution of Critique, in Beyond Representation. Essays 1999-2009. Berlin, n.b.k. Diskurs, 2016.

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This catalogue is a part of the national participation representing Uruguay at the 16. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura at the Biennale di Venezia 2018: Prison to Prison, an Intimate Story between two Architectures, created as a response to the “Freespace” theme proposed by Irish curators Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara.

Prison to Prison is a collective and multiple project developed by a team of more than 15 professionals from different fields of work and bets on the cultural and political dimension of architecture.

Prison to Prison is comprised of the exhibition to be held at the Uruguay Pavilion of the Venice Biennale from May 26 to November 25, 2018; this collection of texts and images; the web platform prisontoprison.uy, an urban fieldwork project developed at Unit n°6 Punta de Rieles01; and a series of events that will take place in Uruguay during the months of the Biennale.

This publication is not just a catalogue. It was conceived and is presented as a tool responding to multiple approaches, as an unfinished work about freedom, the violence of abstraction, and life. It allows looking into the state of the art of architecture.

As you may see in the following pages, this publication is not meant to follow a fixed or hierarchical order; quite on the contrary, it invites you to wander through it randomly. It is not meant to be “one” publication but several publications representing different standpoints that overlap, thus transforming their language and offering, instead of a single answer, various clues of what can be done.

The search for a critical position on certain subjects implies dismantling their devices, describing the relations on which they are built, being able to disassemble and

reassemble the states of things02. Or, as Hito Steyerl says, it implies that the weapons of critique should be replaced by the critique of weapons03.

This catalogue includes critical texts by: Luis Camnitzer, Marcelo Danza, Angelina de los Santos, Natalia Laino, and Daniel Zubillaga Puchot and Rodrigo Rey, from Uruguay; Hélio Menezes and Francesco Perrotta-Bosch from Brazil; Ethel Baraona, Ángel Borrego and Andrés Jaque, from Spain; Natalia Agati, Olimpia Florentino, Serena Olcuire, of the Ati Suffix group, from Italy; interviews to Luis Parodi and Juan Miguel Petit; and a roundtable with Centro Cultural Matices from Unit n°6 of Punta de Rieles.

It also includes the following selection of critical images: an unpublished essay by photographer Agustín Fernández and by Martín Amande from Unit n°6; a research on the images of Unit n°1 produced by the Uruguayan Ministry of the Interior; and a research project by Prison to Prison team on the video game Prison Architect; as well as works by Harun Farocki, from Germany; Antoni Muntadas, from Spain; Regina José Galindo, from Guatemala; Berna Reale, from Brazil; Matías Nin, from Uruguay and Conor McGrady, from Northern Ireland.

In addition, this publication is disrupted and supplemented by a big poster that intends to carefully disassemble and analyze the architectural models that were at the origin of Prison to Prison, an Intimate Story between two Architectures.

Enjoy!

Hoping we may be able to create a spark together, Truly yours Prison to Prison team

#prison to prison An intimate story between two architectures

01 Hito STEYERL. Beyond Representation. Essays 1999-2009. Berlin, n.b.k.

Diskurs, 2016.

“Which montage between two images/elements could be imagined that would result in something different between and outside these two, which would not represent a compromise but would instead belong to a different order – roughly the way someone might tenaciously pound two dull stones together to create a spark in the dark?

Whether this spark, which one could also call the spark of the political, can be created at all is a question of this articulation”.

Hito Steyerl, The Articulation of Protest.01

img 1. Technique for setting fire by percussion.

Taken from Google Images.

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1. The urgent, the ironic, pounding stones together, and the political.

02 See full list and article at http:// www.artribune.com/progettazione/ architettura/2017/12/2017-anno-architettura-bilancio-artribune/

a. 2017, Grenfell Tower and the urgent On June 14, 2017 a huge fire took hold of Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, London, killing at least 70 people and leaving about 100 injured. The tower comprising 120 flats over 24 stories was almost entirely destroyed by the fire, which spread so fast that the building turned into a deadly trap for the residents who could not escape.

The social housing tower of brutalist architecture designed in 1967 and built in 1974, was located within spitting distance of one of the most expensive boroughs of the English capital. In 2015, the tower, run by England’s largest tenant management organization, received a refurbishing both in the inside and outside, which included, among other actions, a “restyling” in line with current

img 02. The Grenfell Tower on fire. Taken from Google Images.

times, in order to leave behind its embarrassing look of the 1970s and to adapt to the transformations undergone by the area.

However, in the end, this change of skin would not bring good news. Quite the contrary, it would be the death sentence for many of the tower’s residents.

According to studies conducted after the disaster, the explanation for the fire spreading so quickly across the structure would be the new cladding that ended up being flammable.

In 2018, the Italian art and architecture site Artribune, has chosen the Grenfell Tower fire as the major event of global architecture in “2017, un anno di architettura”, which is an interesting wake-up call. Quoting the site: “No captivating render. No ribbon cutting ceremony. Not even the portrait of a successful designer.

Six months after the fire, there is only one image through which last year’s architectural scenario can be reviewed: this ruthless and upsetting event”.02 We can see how in a single event, to a great extent connected with architectural and urban issues, simultaneously converge a huge number of phenomena and tensions characteristic of our times: not only the urgency for decent social housing policies but deregulation and involvement of public urban policies in relation to private interests as well; the predominant importance of the image in the architecture market (and design!), the imperative of the value of the square meter over the value of experience, the need for constant renovation and also multiculturalism, the tenacious urban segregation of the excluded, change accelerationism, subjectivity or negligence of authorities.

But there are facts that, a priori, seem alien to architecture, but that however, after a second and fresher look are found amazingly filled with a complex intensity characteristic of our times, which mark, or should mark, the agenda of what is urgent03 in our practice in respect of the Other.

12

03 Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist says about this: “I always ask myself: ‘is it urgent?’, urgent is my favorite word”.

feature/urgent_is_to_take_a_distance/

In this disturbing context, it seems that nothing is more urgent -than finding them- to downplay the consumerism of the Other—political exoticism—and to develop new strategies of critical perception, understanding, and evaluation of reality, which can be interpreted in diverse ways and are open to multiple understandings of “the truth”.04

05 Franco Bifo Berardi, On the

b. 2017, Punta de Rieles prisons and the ironic Though it’s hard to believe,

“Possibility of Joy”, An interview,

the biggest building constructed in Uruguay in 2017 was a prison. In one of the most consolidated and recognized democracies of Latin America, such a symbolic fact —almost unnoticed— surprises and at the same time makes us think of our collective fears and desires, and also of the scopes and limitations of architecture. This new prison is Unit °No. 1 Punta de Rieles, which built over an area of 18 hectares, with an accommodation capacity for 1960 inmates and a budget of almost 100 million dollars, has become Uruguay’s second prison in terms of capacity. It is also the first Uruguayan public-private partnership (PPP) financing experience as far as prisons are concerned.

But it’s not all bad news from the South. Ironically, the new prison has been built adjoining (and sharing the dividing wall) the existing Unit No.°6 Punta de Rieles Prison, known as “cárcel pueblo”* (the “village-like prison”). This is a unique experience in Uruguay and in our continent. The prison, accommodating 600 inmates, has been devised as a village imitating the urban logic of the outside in the inside, thus creating an unprecedented Freespace in the least expected context: the Uruguayan prison system.

Since the inauguration of the new prison in 2018, on the same plot in the outskirts of Montevideo, two prisons coexist, almost in a schizoid fashion, which were amazingly planned during the same government but totally opposed as far as their views on punishment, confinement, surveillance, technology, movements, space, and above all, humanity, are concerned. The result: a real and gigantic architectural oxymoron extending over more than 30 hectares.

Even more interesting -when we, as architects, try to understand the meaning of oxymoron- is the peculiar fact that neither of the two prisons has been designed by Uruguayan architects. The new prison replicates an abstract model brought from abroad which has been implemented under the guidelines of a private construction company, while the “village-like prison” has built itself on the basis of previously existing constructions and other structures built by inmates themselves, disregarding any architectural and academic involvement.

The irony of the situation makes it attractive, and it is interesting to look at things from this ironic perspective. As the Italian philosopher Franco Bifo Berardi crudely says: “we live in hell, but in hell we have the capacity, an ironic capacity, to create sensitive lifespaces; a life which does not rule out joy as a possible dimension.

Don’t forget the possibility for joy. That is the motto for today.05

04 Hou Hanru, Correspondence between curators Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist, in http://www.artpractical.com/

Clinamen, http://www.publicseminar. org/2018/01/franco-bifo-berardi-on-the-possibility-of-joy 06 Freespace is the theme proposed by the curators of the 2018 Biennale, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects.

07 This concept is related to the idea of the fireflies analyzed in Surivival of the Fireflies by Didi-Huberman. Translate Lia Swope Mitchell.

c. Freespace, pounding stones together, and the political Within the

*Translator’s Note: In English, the Spanish word “pueblo” means both “village” and “people” in all its senses. The English language cannot convey both meaning with only one word.

context of the present edition of the International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, it’s important to ask ourselves whether we can find a program more architectural than the prison, where daily life of inmates is defined around the clock by the building itself; where sleeping, eating, walking, talking, sharing, thinking, looking, are actions inexorably defined by the architectural framework of the prison in which they occur.

Could we intend to inquire into the architectural concept of Freespace06 in a place which is perhaps the most opposed? The answer should be yes, and this is the origin of Prison to Prison, an Intimate Story between two Architectures.

Like prehistoric men forced to analyze with care all that was around them to take a thorough decision on how to act, because survival depended on those decisions, we’ll be able to hold strongly these two huge concrete/and brick stones in each hand to pound them violently together. And from that instant, that forced collision of the opposed, create, as Hito Steyerl says in the opening quote of this text, the spark of the political.

Sparks that will no longer be a general, extreme, full white light illuminating everything, but timidly brilliant07 signs, singularities, transient brightness breaking into the night with new glitters of hope.

Finally, the time has come to throw into the dustbin of history the souvenir art of the hammer and sickle. If we consider the architecture-politics relation-

13

img 03. Two prisons in Punta de Rieles. Image taken by Fabiรกn Sarubbi for Prison to Prison.

14

08 Hito Steyerl, Los condenados de la pantalla. Argentina, Caja Negra, 2014.

09 Ibidem.

ship as something that happens elsewhere, applicable to deprived communities for which nobody speaks, we will end forgetting what makes today architecture intrinsically political: its role as a place of work, conflict, and… joy08.

Fortunately, architecture is not alien to politics. Politics is intrinsically involved in the production, distribution and reception of architecture. So, if we approach this issue optimistically, we would be able to get beyond representation politics and embark ourselves on a political sphere that is just in front of us, ready to be embraced.09

img 04. Berna Reale taking the olympic torch through a Brazilian Prison. Americano, image courtesy of the artist.

2. Small town, big hell A soldier walks through a novel and newly-born border, the division wall between two prisons in Punta de Rieles: two buildings that are adjacent but very distant in their conception. The soldier seems to traverse the dialoguing space of two architectures coexisting in the same territory but speaking a different language, which, making reference to Ángel Rama’s lettered city, we could recognize as a materialized architectural diglossia.

a. The “village-like prison”, Unit No.6 Punta de Rieles The so called “village-like prison”, which has become relevant both at the national and international level, is a unique and emerging experience among prison models that remain unchanged over time. This is especially interesting as the management and spatial organization of the prison incorporates strategies originated in a contemporary urban logic.

15

The prison’s wardem, Luis Parodi, the first civilian with a bachelor’s degree in education to run a Uruguayan prison (instead of a police officer) says that the idea is very simple but this does not mean that it is less strong and upsetting in current discussions: “if we create a system that resembles the outside, the experience with this system will probably be useful when inmates leave the prison. (…) In fact, the paradox and the innovative feature of this system is that a prison can be a decent and working place.”10 Since 2010, a unique experience of collective transformation with the participation of 600 inmates has been developed in that prison. Over an area of 13 hectares a sort of heterotopic neighborhood was deployed, with characteristics very similar to those of any other neighborhood in the outskirts of Montevideo, such as that surrounding the prison.

img 05.

The prison was built on the site of the former women’s prison during the last military dictatorship in Uruguay, uses preexisting structures accumulated for decades, incorporates new ones to respond to the needs, all managed and organized by inmates themselves.

The space has been structured around three winding main streets in the place known as the prison’s “downtown”, or main square. These streets give access to the commercial zone, the industrial pole, vegetable gardens and also the sports area, the educational centre and dozens of scattered cell blocks.

Operating schedules and guidelines are precise and strict, but do not prevent the free circulation of inmates throughout the space, their participation in different activities and the possibility of creating their own daily routines. This space has favored the materialization of about 60 productive enterprises conducted by the inmates.

For instance, they have knocked into shape several enterprises: reinforcement of concrete blocks, carpentry and ironwork shop work, repair of fiberglass boats, sewing workshops, groceries, houseware stores, bakery and pizza shop, recycling and other activities. A remarkable characteristic of these enterprises is that inmates finance their own projects. To that end they have organized a sort of “bank” that contributes “seed capital” to each new development11. The profits accrued by their work may be used at the prison’s shops or delivered to their families.

An emblematic example of this process is Gigor, a bakery run by two inmates who have been released but every day return to work at the prison. At least 100 people are employed to cover the bakery’s three shifts. The products, delivered by truck from Punta de Rieles, reach the entire metropolitan area of Montevideo.

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img 05 y img 06. The limit between both prisons. Image by Prison to Prison.

img 06.

10 Interview to Luis Parodi at Punta de Rieles, La cárcel uruguaya que parece un pueblo, La Nación, March 14, 2017.

Argentina.

11 Annual report of the 2016 Parliamentary Commissioner for the Prison System.

12 Federación Uruguaya de Cooperativas de Vivienda de Ayuda Mutua.

13 Angelina de los Santos, Una cárcel,

Last year, Cooperativa de Vivienda Resiliencia was established with the support of the historic FUCVAM12. Its members are inmates struggling to build their own houses in the city to live in after they are released.

This connection with the outside is also reinforced in the educational field through teachers for different educational levels who give classes in the prison, and also through student-inmates who attend courses at different schools of the University of the Republic.

Several activities are developed at the main square, the soccer field and the open areas: musical shows, troupe parades, yoga, political meetings and last but not least, meetings with family and friends who come to visit. These visits no longer take place under humiliating conditions. Now, inmates can have a talk with their families and friends under the shadow of a tree.

mil incógnitas, El País, www.elpais.com. uy/que-pasa/carcel-mil-incognitas 14 Video in the youtube account of the Ministry of the Interior, “Unidad Nº 1 de Montevideo: la primera “PPP” del país”, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mzaOoVxjgoE 15 Instituto Nacional de Rehabilitación (National Rehabilitation Institute).

b. The new prison, Unit No.1 Punta de Rieles On the other side of the wall, the new Punta de Rieles prison, with an area of 18 hectares, is also an unprecedented experience in the context of Uruguay’s prison system, not only for its modality of financing, but also for its construction, organization and applied technology. It has been progressively commissioned since February 2018, and will provide accommodation for 1860 low and medium dangerous male inmates, and 100 places at its admission centre.

The justification of the authorities for this highly criticized construction is always the same: “poor confinement conditions make “rehabilitation” impossible, and with 2000 more places available, overcrowding will no longer be an issue”13.

To that end, the prison has been structured in four large areas devoted to clearly segmented functions, and conceived to be occupied by different types of users, that in turn are differentiated too.

The first is the access area, which includes parking lot, management and a check spot to examine anyone who wants to enter the prison, thus operating as a security gate. The second area is called the mixed area, which, according to its constructors, “hosts the activities which connect inmates with the outside, either for their admission or release, or for personal and family encounters. It is also the place for their daily activities and follow-up of their in-prison treatment.14” The third area includes buildings and free spaces devoted to health care, education and sports.

The fourth and largest area is the housing area, where inmates will spend most of their time. Blocks are divided as per three prison classification levels, and, according to the Ministry of the Interior, are spatially organized in “18 entirely independent modules; this allows to define a large number of inmate profiles in line with prison treatment programs”.

Cell blocks are separated from each other to provide space for narrow yards and “green areas” for “recreational” purposes. They are connected by a grotesque external technical gallery that allows the access of maintenance technicians without them running into the users of the spaces they serve.

Beyond, a fifth area exists which was never described by the authorities in the presentation: a huge void that leaves an unsolved question: is it designated for future extensions?

All movements, deliberate, calculated and video surveilled, are also categorized as per users and functions: “access of visitors”, “access of INR15”, “admission”, “convicts”, “medium individual security”, “medium security”, “low security”, “supplies”, “food distribution and commissary”, and “firefighters”.

Inmates are young men who have been transferred from other prisons of the country in groups of 60. Upon arrival, they are deprived of their belongings that are kept in lockers until their release. Their clothes are replaced by a new uniform, a novelty for the Uruguayan prison system.

They spend their lives in prefabricated concrete cells equipped with anti-vandalism metal furniture adhered to walls and floors, electronically controlled doors, aisles under video camera surveillance, and concrete common areas equipped with concrete equipment as well.

The prison is entirely surrounded by a high concrete wall that blocks any attempt to look through it. The green roofs of the prefab concrete cell blocks painted in pastel colors can be seen from the outside. This image, alien to our country and more typical of the common imaginary of generic prisons we watch

17

16 Video in the youtube account of the Ministry of the Interior, “Unidad Nº 1 de Montevideo: la primera “PPP” del país”, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mzaOoVxjgoE 17 Idea taken from the book “El mono gramático” by Octavio Paz.

img 07. An Intimate Story between two Architectures.

Image by Prison to Prison.

18

18 Making reference to the Walter Benjamin’s idea of making something dialectic.

Georges Didi-Huberman, Volver sensible / hacer sensible, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia Editora, 2014.

in TV series, seems to refute the spot of the Ministry of the Interior describing the prison: “the Unit, with two or three-story buildings and the appropriate color treatment, blends perfectly into the environment and offers to the city a modern image that is very far from the traditional concept of a prison”16.

From the inside, the horizon disappears; it is difficult to look beyond the walls.

19 Alain Badiou, Veinticuatro notas sobre los usos de la palabra “pueblo”, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia Editora,

3. Aiming at the production of dialectic sparkles

2014.

20 Giorgio Agamben, “Meios sem fin. Notas sobre a política”, Belo Horizonte, Brasil, Autêntica Editora, 2017.

21 Ibidem.

From this confrontation, or let us say, from these collisions of architectural models, sparkles, inevitably dialectic sparkles, will be created that with their light will allow us to see through the prisons themselves and plunge into a universal transparency that let us see that in this17. Through this exercise, we will be able to interpret other dialectic phenomena that exceed the subjects of study themselves in order to enrich ourselves and then look at (us) again.

Then, the point will be to make the visible dialectic: to create other images, look at them in a different light, incorporate division associated with movement, emotion blended with thought. Rub the eyes. In brief: rub the representation with affection, the ideal with the repressed, the sublimated with the symptomatic18.

a. Chhhhck! people and People What people live in the spaces of these prisons?

Of what people are we speaking when we speak of “village-like prison”? Is it the same people that live in the new adjacent prison?

Is it still possible to speak of people in a single sense? But isn’t there also “the people” in the sense that, even without ever activating an assembled detachment, is nevertheless not truly included in the contingent of “the sovereign people” as constituted by the State? We will answer “yes”. It makes sense to speak of “the people’s people” as they are what the official people, in the guise of the State, regard as nonexistent.19 In this respect, Giorgio Agamben reminds us that “any interpretation of the political meaning of the term people ought to start from the peculiar fact that in modern European languages this term always indicates also the poor, the underprivileged and the excluded (the Italian popolo, the French peuple, the Spanish pueblo, the Portuguese povo). The same term names the constitutive political subject as well as the class that, de factum or even de jure, is excluded from politics.20 In this way, this first collision enlightens us about what Agamben sees as the fundamental biopolitical fracture present in the very heart of the notion of people. A term that, as many of the fundamental political concepts is an extreme concept with an underlying double movement and a complex relationship between its two ends, between bare life (people) and political existence (People), exclusion and inclusion, zoé and bios21.

Going back to Punta de Rieles, anyone can observe that in both prisons live individuals of the same people, that that is always written in small letters, which is also the people that overcrowd the other prisons of Uruguay and the continent: materially and intangibly distant from the People by a rapidly growing fracture that is fundamental to society.

However, if we look closer at these big colliding stones, a significant difference that cannot be ignored becomes evident to an attentive eye: the way in which both prisons become a people.

It’s no news that the role of the new prison is to confine and make its people invisible. Like its architecture, this prison is not questioned, nor allowed to question itself: the way blocks are arranged has been already devised by somebody else. It perpetuates, reproduces and keeps the states of things –or makes them worse–, follows guidelines that have been established for the long term, that will be those in line with the outcomes expected by the People that has built it.

But on the other side, the unique experience developed at the ”village-like prison” is a disruption in what is expected, a certain liberating performative fracture which questions the very fate of that people, and why not, of the integrated People.

From this space where opportunity and uncertainty are possible, it would seem that a linguistic form of autogenesis is at work in the expression “we, the people”; it seems a rather magical or at least one that compels us to believe in the magical nature of the performative22.

19

In April 2018 an event to raise funds for the mutual aid housing cooperatives that inmates are organizing to build their own houses when they are released, took place at the public space of ”the village-like prison”. Isn’t it a performative act a public and collective “chorizada” inside a prison that imitates a village? Isn’t it a celebration of life that perhaps we could call an heterotopic commemoration of the “people”, a political event that reclaims access by inmates to their own houses and takes place in the public space of a prison, incorporates musical shows and a troupe parade?

22 Judith Butler, “Nosotros el Pueblo”, apuntes sobre la libertad de reunión, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia Editora, 2014.

23 Jacques Rancière, El desacuerdo, política y filosofía, Ediciones Nueva Visión, Buenos Aires, 2010.

24 The authors of this text submitted

b. Trraaack! police and politics. Pounding these stones together once more,

to the authorities a formal request to

and continuing this dialectic relationship of fundamental inequality of the notion of people, it is inevitable to get into the field of the political.

In this regard, Jacques Rancière says: “the ’people’ is the name, the form of subjectification, of the immemorial and perennial wrong through which the social order is symbolized by dooming the majority of speaking beings to the night of silence (…). A symbolic distribution of bodies that divides them into two categories; those that one sees and those that one does not see, those who have a logos –memorial speech, an account to be kept up- and those who have no logo, those who really speak and those whose voice merely mimics the articulate voice to express pleasure and pain”.23 On this matter, it is interesting to focus briefly on the voices emitted by each prison, who are the speakers and who are the recipients, under what conditions their contents are produced and received, and which is the function that each speaker is looking for with its messages.

Since the inauguration of the new prison, a sound continuously pierces the daily routine of its inhabitants. It is a scary voice coming from the loudspeakers and bouncing off the wall of the prison to spread all over the place. It is a neutral, impersonal, abstract female voice that gives orders and informs the bodies occupying those spaces of their possibilities and impossibilities. Its recipients are invisible, nobody can see them24 and, obviously, they can only reply to the voice in their own minds.

At a scant distance of one hundred meters, crossing the wall, a group of young people are recording and sharing through the internet a radio show produced by them and called Somos lo que somos. Every week they discuss topics they propose: from political issues to reflections on their day-to-day life.

Some musical projects framed in Matices Culturales, an independent group born in the prison and composed of some of the inmates, have managed to go beyond the prison’s walls and be heard throughout the city. For example, the show at Sala Zitarrosa25 performed by the whole group or the solo performance by hip hopper Kung Fu Ombijam at Teatro Solís, Montevideo’s most historical theatre.

The same disparity occurs with the voices incoming and outgoing through mobile phones. At one side of the dividing wall, waves are disrupted by signal blockers, while on the other side, free access to both mobile phones and the Internet is allowed.

These human sounds that are emitted –and are not emitted– from these prisons to satellites and then back to us, are essentially political sounds. In their origin they propose another fundamental dialectic issue recognized by Rancière as structuring the political, that is the outcome of the conflictive encounter of two opposed heterogeneous processes.

According to the author, the first is the government, which he names police. A process that consists in the unification of a society around a reassuring distribution of places and roles.26.

Rancière says: “the police is, essentially, the law, generally implicit, that defines a party’s share, or lack of it. But to define this, you first must define the configuration of the perceptible in which one or the other is inscribed. In this sense, police encompasses an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that the speech is understood as discourse and another as noise In the formulation of this opposition, the second process, in conflict with the other, is that of equality, which the author calls politics: the set of practices driven by the assumption of equality between any and every speaking being and by the concern to test this equality27.

enter Unit No. 1 and received no reply.

20

The commissioning of this new prison has been conducted under a veil of secrecy. Few stakeholders are being allowed access to the prison.

25 Sala Zitarrosa is one of Montevideo’s most renowned performance theaters.

26 Jacques Rancière, Política, policía, democracia, Santiago: LOM Ediciones; 2006.

27 Ibidem.

28 Jacques Rancière, El desacuerdo, política y filosofía, Ediciones Nueva Visión, Buenos Aires, 2010.

29 Iñaki Ábalos, La buena vida, Visita guiada a las casas de la modernidad, GG Editores, Barcelona, 2000.

30 Concept taken from Franco Bifo Berardi.

Thus, “politics exists because those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account, setting up a community by the fact of placing in common a wrong that is nothing more than this very confrontation; the contradiction of two worlds in a single world: the world where they are and the world where they are not, the world where there is ‘something’ between them and those who do not recognize them as speaking beings of some account and the world where there is nothing”28.

Blockers of communication and access to the global network, speaking beings giving orders and debating in self-run radio shows: they are sound synecdoches of this confrontation between two architectures of which these two prisons are a contemporaneous living image: a police architecture in juxtaposition with a political architecture.

31 Franco Bifo Berardi, Fenomenología del Fin. Argentina: Caja Negra, 2016.

32 Vilém Flusser, Luzes, in Flusser Brasil, http://flusserbrasil.com/art163.pdf

c. Pppaaam! power and empowerment Then, how these colliding spaces establish a dialect relationship? How is this encounter between the police and politics inhabited? How do they organize, what kind of uses prevents and enables the people? Could we speak of a freespace in a prison confinement scenario?

Undoubtedly, the new prison is the space of power, of that police and of the People we were talking about. So, necessarily, its space has been quantified, transformed in the product of the dissection of movement, geometry and mathematics. Space barely exists as such: it is understood as Descartes’ res extensa in which visibility is deployed. Its air becomes medical, hygienic, a disinfected space that results from transparency, sunlight and cleaning29.

We can detect then, a frigid space that has been subjected to the sublime frigidity of abstraction30 at the service of the power to which its responds, and with its complicity.

The history of Western Civilization can be regarded as the slow and irreversible distancing from Nature in the name of abstraction31. Enlightenment had already allowed the man carrying the light of reason to manipulate life scenes as in a toy theatre through this fundamental instrument to find out the Truth at the service of Power over the world.32.

img 08. The Nation Builders, by Conor McGrady. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by Kevin Noble.

21

img 09. Aerial image of an event held inside the village-like prison in support of the Housing Cooperative ‘Resiliencia’. Image by Fabián Sarubbi for Prison to Prison.

On this topic, Adorno and Horkheimer sustain that “abstraction stands in the same relationship to its objects as fate, whose concept it eradicates as liquidation so the liberated themselves finally became the herd which Hegel identified as the outcome of the Enlightenment’33.

This eagerness for abstraction finds its more beautiful expression in the inorganic and in what rejects life, in the crystalline, or, in general, in all subjection to the law and the abstract need34. In this sense, the prison as a whole institution is, from its inception, a favorite specimen for such imperative.

So, the prison space has been stripped, losing its architectural substance, and has turned into a neutral accumulation of boxes under video surveillance. An abstract frame where the human drama takes place, and that certainly produces an abstract existence as well as the Fordist factories produced abstract work35.

However, just crossing the dividing wall, the spatial relationship with power seems different at the Punta de Rieles village-like prison. On the knowledge that we cannot speak of liberty inside a prison, the hypothesis we propose is that the exceptional circumstances under which its inmates relate with the urban space that they themselves have been modifying, can give rise to new and unexpected forms of (micro) powers that question what has been established; and this is fascinating.

Let us imagine the unique public space of this prison, its streets, its tree-covered areas, the intervention of its spaces with buildings and equipment built by inmates themselves, that enable meetings with pairs and with those coming from the outside. The street needs to be differentiated from the classic European notion of public space as a ritualized site for public activity, such as the piazza and boulevard. The street, which also includes unmarked squares and any available open space, is a raw, unpredictable space. The street can thus also be conceived as a space where new forms of the social and the political can be made, rather than a space for enacting routines as might be the case with a grand traditional park.36

22

33 George Didi-Huberman in Desconfiar de las Imágenes, Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2015.

34 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstracción y Naturaleza, in Franco Bifo Berardi, Fenomenología del Fin. Argentina: Caja Negra, 2016.

35 George Didi-Huberman in Desconfiar de las Imágenes, Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2015.

36 Saskia Sassen, Deep Inside the Global City, http://www.e-flux.com/architecture/urban-village/169799/deep-inside-the-global-city/

37 Ibidem.

38 George Didi-Huberman in Desconfiar de las Imágenes, Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2015.

In these unspoiled and unusual streets, the always excluded can gain presence, perhaps for the first time in their lives, vis-à-vis each Other. This mix of conditions signals the possibility of a new type of politics, centered around new types of political actors and spaces. As Saskia Sassen says: “It is no longer simply a matter of having power or not. There are new hybrid bases from which to act; spaces where the powerless can make history, even without becoming empowered.37

Finally, we can ask ourselves, also with a dialectic approach: why and how architecture production can take part in the destruction of human beings?38 And, nevertheless, at the same time, why and how architecture can make life possible, potentiate and celebrate life, even in the least expected place?

23

This is the Village-like prison unit no.6 punta de rieles Forced to coexist with the prison on the other side. *this model was generated using data taken during several visits to the penitentiary center.

24

This is the New Prison unit no.1 punta de rieles Forced to coexist with the prison on the other side. *this model was reconstructed analyzing advertising videos of the Ministry of the Interior of Uruguay.

25

Prisons Marcelo Danza is a Uruguayan architect. He is Dean of the School of Architecture, Design and Urbanism of the University of the Republic of Uruguay, where he also acts as Professor of Architectural and Urban Projects, Director of the Taller Danza. He is partner of the architecture practice Sprechmann-Danza Arquitectos. He has been curator of the Uruguayan Pavilion in the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008 and 2016.

We are subjected to the inevitable violence of architecture. There it is, always present. It blocks our way, conditions our sight, encloses us within the boundaries of what is permitted, and reminds us that there is a world outside to which we will never have access. Every wall, every window, every framing, unveils the limits of different spaces of power. The impenetrable, forbidden, sanctified areas… the forgotten and the “free” areas – though never totally free– have their corporeal form in architecture.

Also architectural culture commits us to limited epistemic spaces. Our construction of knowledge, our tools to interpret reality, are also –inevitably- our cognitive limits.

As the utmost expression of confinement, prison represents the strictest subjection to architecture that a human being may endure. Total and involuntary isolation exacerbates violence. Absolute confinement to a few square meters, which conditions perception of space and time through one single architecture, is nothing but a smart metaphor of the inevitable conditioning inflicted upon all of us. “Prison to Prison” applies this keen reflection to architectural practices and knowledge, taking two adjoining prisons in Uruguay as a case study. The proposal reflects on architecture production models and their impact on human lives. It drastically breaks the rules of

the traditional sources of architectural knowledge, and shifts the focus to uncomfortable areas for contemporary ethics and aesthetics.

This should not be considered as a naive or erratic operation but as a solid attempt to welcome new spaces of thought and action for current architecture, which is still too self-rejoicing.

“The true knowledge revolves around the boundary between knowledge and ignorance. The tension between certainty and uncertainty is the genuine fuel of thinkers, scientists, creators. And of man’s history and society as well. Pure, brilliant knowledge is nothing but a poor, harmful illusion doomed to triviality.” 01

The archive as a prison Boris Groys spreads light on the cultural construction of contemporary art. His perspicuous analysis classifies human cultural production in “cultural archive” and “profane realm”. The “cultural archive” legitimizes art, while the “profane realm” gathers everything not collected in cultural archives.

Without archives for backup and perpetuation purposes, the “profane realm” is extremely heterogeneous and dynamic. It does not have any kind of records either; therefore, its practices and aesthetics, unless saved from destruction by chance, eventually disappear.

Not being recognized as important by the institutions dealing with culture, they are not worth keeping.

However, this feature is exactly what turns the profane realm into a reserve of “the new”. Being “the other”, it becomes a fascinating field full of discovery and growth opportunities. This is why Groys says that “the source of

01 ZÁTONYI, Marta, (2005), “Aportes a la Estética desde el Arte y la Ciencia del Siglo XX”, Buenos Aires, Argentina, “Biblioteca de la Mirada” Series, Editorial La Marca, Page 21.

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Prisons

the new is the valorizing comparison between cultural values and things in the profane realm”02.

Thus, innovation does not mean creating something that did not exist before but the cultural operation of changing the values ascribed to a certain fact or object, and their transfer from the profane realm to the cultural archive03.

“Innovation does not operate with extra-cultural things themselves, but with cultural hierarchies and values. Innovation does not consist in the emergence of something previously hidden, but in the fact that the value of something always already seen and known is re-valued. The revaluation of values is the general form of innovation: Here the true or the refined that is regarded as valuable is devalorized, while that which was formerly considered profane, alien, primitive, or vulgar, and therefore valueless, is valorized” 04. Marcel Duchamp’s “Ready-Mades” wouldn’t be other than a clear case of this change of values. The urinal renamed “Fountain”, signed under the pseudonym R. Mutt in 1917, and exhibited as a museum piece, clearly illustrates this cultural operation.

Not by chance one of Le Corbusier’s “Toward an architecture” chapters is titled “Out of sight” 05, an allusion to the selective blindness of architecture that, isolated in its “cultivated archive”, had not perceived the fascinating changes that had taken place in the profane realm. In this case, Le Corbusier’s activism aims at transferring the value of profane practices and aesthetics –represented by engineering and machines– to architectural culture.

Some time later, modern revolutionary manifestos had already become the new “cultural archive”. And again, the profane was not included in the archives. The profane was now represented by the ordinary, neither heroic nor modern city; anybody’s architecture built by anyone, anywhere. While the archive culture only cares about a certain functional and volumetric purity

considered as a foolproof method to interact with the world, the natural and “impure” transformation of the profane realm continues. The city of builders and plots, of vernacular building techniques, of skills and of different building typologies is the city spreading along banal space. Nowadays, the profane is what modern architects would call vulgar, meaningless or with no aesthetic quality. Again, revaluation of values takes place through the texts of some architectural thinkers that redescribe the other with an unexpected attention. The titles of some of today’s most relevant essays are clarifying enough: “Learning from Las Vegas” 06, “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture”07 or “The architecture of the City” 08, are some of the best known. Revaluation as an operation viewing what already exists under a new light is in action again.

On the basis of Groys’ hypothesis of the cultural construction of art, the huge profane realm of an architectural practice free from formal culture control acquires a renewed interest. “Prison to Prison” smartly adheres to this trend. It points out practices until now alien to architectural study, and proposes to enrich the architectural archive with them. “the death of the museum –and of the art history embodied by the museum– must be interpreted as a resurrection of true, living art, as a turning toward true reality, life, toward the great Other”.09

The prison of discourse “Police encompasses an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular

02 GROYS, Boris, (2008), “Sobre lo nuevo. Ensayo de una economía cultural”. “Ensayo” Series, Editorial Pre-textos, Page 77.

03 GROYS suggests the existence of a “cultural archive” that organizes and legitimates art and culture in general. Everything else belongs to the “profane realm”.

04 GROYS, Boris, (2008), “Sobre lo nuevo. Ensayo de una economía cultural”. “Ensayo” Series, Editorial Pre-textos, Page 19.

05 LE CORBUSIER, (1998), “Hacia una arquitectura”, Barcelona, Spain, “Poseidón” Series, Editorial Apóstrofe, Page 65 06 VENTURI, Robert, Denisse Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, (1998), “Aprendiendo de Las Vegas, El simbolismo olvidado de la forma arquitectónica”, Editorial Gustavo Gili.

07 VENTURI, Robert, (2008), ”Complejidad y contradicción en la arquitectura”, Editorial Gustavo Gili.

08 ROSSI, Aldo, (2015), “La arquitectura de la ciudad”, Editorial Gustavo Gili.

09 GROYS, Boris, (2008), “Sobre lo nuevo. Ensayo de una economía cultural”, “Ensayo” Series, Editorial Pre-textos.

27

activity is visible and another is not, that the speech is understood as discourse and another as noise”.10 Jaques Rancière suggests an interpretation of the social body of the polis, where he identifies two different and opposite situations as far as power and the order of things are concerned. On the one hand, the “police”, which he urges not to confuse with law enforcement but to consider as the power distributing the spaces, order and hierarchies of things in the city, and allocating to each part its place and specific role within the social framework. On the other hand, Rancière defines “politics” as a sector of the social body that when subjected to that distribution of order and power, responds with a drive for equality. Both terms –police and politics– have a common root: “polis”, and represent essential parts of the city. Both sectors exist and are activated in relation to each other.

Bodies and their allocated places in the polis, permitted and inappropriate activities, sounds that are part of discourse and the non encodable: noise. The intelligible and the undecipherable. Sound and the inaudible.

This is how Rancière describes city spaces (as cultural constructions), their orders of legitimacy power, and their drive for equality. Formal culture is only capable of understanding, investigating and conveying as knowledge all that can be decoded as a discourse. All that is not understood or cannot be decoded is considered undecipherable noise. Politics finds sense and discourse in what was only perceived as noise.

“Politics is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination; it makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only a place for noise”.11

The city –polis- experiences and feels all these somatic tensions. Within the city, architecture, as materialization of this social body, is not alien to this logic: there is police and there is politics in architecture. While architectural culture is still chiefly obsessed by creating and controlling iconic, representative and structuring objects, alternative practices and activities promoting egalitarianism flourish beyond its domain.

Politics in architecture becomes evident when those not belonging to the dominant group claim for equality and challenge the logic of domination considered as “natural” by the dominant group.

There are lots of annoying noises for architectural culture in the cities where we live. In some cities, as South-American ones, these noises may even overshadow the discourse, unsettling and often neutralizing architectural culture. One of the challenges of contemporary city planners is to identify the discourse among the noise through careful and attentive listening.

The real and symbolic alterations of space spontaneously made by social bodies are rich sources of discourse still incomprehensible for architectural culture. Its police, as “an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying” is not prepared to find in itself the potential for new discourses.

The tension between politics and police represented by the “cárcel pueblo” (village-like prison) and the “generic prison”, respectively, is undeniable when their proximity becomes exacerbated. “Prison to Prison” reveals this case study and evidences the rigidity and ineffectiveness of the established discourse when applied to certain architectural structures, and manages to formulate a new discourse among the noise, which is one of the foremost challenges to contemporary architectural culture.

10 RANCIÈRE, Jacques, (1995), “El desacuerdo. Política y filosofía”, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Ediciones “Nueva Visión”, page 22.

11 Ibidem, page 21.

28

Prisons

* This selection of images and comments was made by Prison to Prison based on YouTube tutorial videos that teach playing Prison Architect.

2014.

in “Prisons”, CLOG Editions,

developers visit Alcatraz”,

Architects, When videogame

02 Mark Morris, “Prison

game trailer.

01 Initial phrase of the video

Prison Architect

In 2012, an English videogame called Prison Architect was released, and quickly became a bestseller.

As the trailer says, “welcome to the the world’s best ‘lock em up’”01. The player is invited to supervise the construction and daily management of a prison, moving through a 2D omnipresent plane. The player is also invited to manage the prison’s budget.

It decreases with each expend and increases with each new inmate.

Its inhabitants are atoms in motion and, as the trailer goes, “all they seem to do is eat, shit and ... fight”. Each event occurs guided by rules determined by algorithms. The creator of the game states that “life in prisons is still a set of strict rules, which makes it especially appropiate for computer simulation.”02 Aren’t abstract prisons predictable and maneagable universes, just like this video game teaches us?

Learning from a Videogame (developed by Introversion Software)

PRISON ARCHITECT

img 03

img 02

img 01

29

* Image taken from: YouTube video “Prison Architect - Starting Out - PART #1”, User: Sips.

Img 02 Construction has begun! Starting from an empty plot, the first lines that will guide the construction are drawn. Each material and construction element is chosen from certain menus. The total available budget appears at the top of the screen. With each incorporation decreases, with each new prisoner increases.

* Image and comments taken from: YouTube video “Prison Architect - Starting Out - PART #1”, User: Sips.

img 01 When starting, on the menu “Create a New Prison”, we can choose between a “small, medium or large” jail. “Yes! We are definitely gonna make a large prison!” We can also choose different condiments to make the game more challenging. For example: “Failure Conditions: An extra challenge!

You will be sacked and it will be game over if you let things get too bad (riots, bankruptcy, too many deaths or escapes, etc.)”.

Or, “Gangs: Some prisoners will arrive with gang allegiances and will attack rival gang members on site. Extra challenge.”

img 05

img 04

* Image taken from: YouTube video “Prison Architect Trailer”, User: IVSoftware.

img 06 Fight Time!

* Image and comment taken from: YouTube video “Prison Architect Trailer”, User: IVSoftware.

img 05 “All I seem to do is eat, shit, and fight!”

* Image taken from: Google Images.

img 04 The CEO is to whom the prison belongs. He says: “It’s not our place to decide if he deserves this. The Law has made that decision. We’re here to do a job”.

* Image and comments taken from: YouTube video “Prison Architect - Intake - PART #2”, User: Sips.

img 03 By clicking on each prisoner we can see his file and biography. Glen McGrath has been sentenced to 4 years for kidnapping, he is now in solitary confinement. “He’s been put in solitary. He’s been punished.“

img 08

img 07

img 06

Prison Architect

img 09

img 10

31

* Image and comment taken from: YouTube video “Prison Architect - Starting Out - PART #1”, User: Sips.v

img 10 “Constructing a Building to house the Execution Facility”.

“It would be really cool this time actually having an electric chair.

I’ve played this game many, many times, but I don’t think I ever executed anyone. I would love to execute someone”.

* Image and comment taken from: YouTube video “Prison Architect Trailer”, User: IVSoftware.

img 09 “Build and manage a Maximum Security Prison. Prison Architect. Your Prison, Your Rules!”

* Image and comment taken from: YouTube video “Prison Architect Trailer”, User: IVSoftware.

img 08 “Build and manage a Maximum Security Prison. Prison Architect. Your Prison, Your Rules!”

* Image and comment taken from: YouTube video “Prison Architect - Ep. 4 - Squashing the Riot! - Story Mode Chapter 3 - Let’s Play”, User: Blitz.

img 07 A riot has started in the canteen. Finally, the police enter. Prisoners have hostages, including the prison’s CEO. “Ok, they killed the CEO, so they killed everybody. That’s what lateral damage looks like”.

Roundtable at Punta de Rieles prison ‘SomoS lo que SomoS’ radio show, organized by ‘Matices Culturales’, a cultural center run by the inmates of Unit No. 6 Punta de Rieles.

Federico González (FG): Good afternoon from Unit No. 6 Punta de Rieles. Welcome to Matices Culturales, welcome to…

Martín Amande (MA): SomoS lo que SomoS. Adrián Baraldo (AB): If you listen to us and you enjoy the show, please share it, you’ll be helping to spread it.

FG: Wednesday, April 18, 2018. We are starting broadcast number…

AB: 35.

MA: Good afternoon, Adrián, Fede, how are you?

AB: Here we are, starting the show. How are you, Martín?

MA: I’m fine, even if weather is a bit mixed-up, isn’t it? What’s the agenda for today?

AB: Another roundtable. Today we have guests: a group of architects that has been around here for a while, taking notes and speaking with people. Tell us, why are you in Punta de Rieles?

Prison to Prison (P2P): We’ve been working on a project since last year, and we intend to continue working on it for all this year. It’s called Prison to Prison and subtitled “an intimate story between two architectures”.

Our Project was selected through an open competition to represent our country at the International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

This year the title of the Biennale is Freespace, a rather political subject. We wanted the Uruguay project, like those of other countries, to be related to politics and to offer contributions from an architectural perspective.

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Roundtable at Punta de Rieles Prison

“We wanted the Uruguay project, like those of other countries, to be related to politics and to offer contributions from an architectural perspective”

Last year we visited this prison for the first time. Both this prison model and the one being built next to it had a real impact on us.

After some research the neighboring prison turned out to be the biggest building built in Uruguay in 2017. This is a symbol we wouldn’t miss, not only as members of our society but also as architects: it’s a huge building!

Our project intends to compare these two architectural models that, ironically, coexist next to each other, and detect the different relation with space in each place and the ensuing possibilities and impossibilities, always from an architectural perspective.

So, we’d like you to tell us how do you live this model and what do you think of the next-door model.

prison to prison team

AB: The comparison you propose is very interesting. I’m surprised to hear that Unit No. 1 is the largest building built in Uruguay in 2017. It’s neither a school nor a hospital. Besides, the characteristics of that prison… not a single green spot there. Only the roof is green.

It’s the same controlling ideology present in Discipline and Punish. It doesn’t intend to change that paradigm to that of watch and educate, our model, where we create spaces ourselves. For example, you came here to share this radio show, to talk with us.

MA: I’d like to know more about the other projects at the Biennale and why they have a political meaning too.

Our listeners already know what we think of the prison next door. We think it’s fine to problematize and visualize what’s being done, because society doesn’t question these things. The man in the street hasn’t realized yet that we are all paying for this prison: 127 million dollars and a 27-year outsourcing agreement. That’s a lot of money, of our money.

P2P: As for other countries’ participations, the German project is called Unbuilding Walls (because of the Fall of the Berlin Wall), U. S. project is called Dimensions of Citizenship, Brazil project is Walls of Air… MA: A lot of walls are being built these days. The other day we were talking about deaths in Syria and about the walls that are being erected there; they are sending a message. Here, by building this prison, the State is sending a message too. It’s OK to discuss it, despite media information or disinformation and the fear they generate in the community.

I think it’s important to discuss everything that happens. It’s important that both society and State promote a political debate.

P2P: There’s a great difference between these two universes for us too.

We’ve been able to come here and talk to you, but we haven’t been allowed to visit the other prison.

MA: They’re two completely opposite models.

P2P: How would you describe to a stranger the way you take ownership of the space here?

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“Both prisons are antagonistic. In this prison we have the possibility of studying at the University or working, we have a quiet place to receive our visits” martín amande

MA: Here we are given the opportunity to do things. We can create spaces, we are able to create our own places. We try to organize collective undertakings dealing with education, co-operatives, art, music. We think activities in these fields make us feel well.

Both prisons are antagonistic. In this prison we have the possibility of studying at the University or working, we have a quiet place to receive our visits.

Conditions in this prison are different.

Experts from all over the world have said it. Good things can be done in prisons with a lower number of inmates. Changes may be made. Here, there are green spots, there’s the opportunity to socialize with other people. We’re allowed to build our own life or to deconstruct our previous life. We can speak from a different perspective.

We’ve realized that if we don’t speak about politics we won’t be able to change perspectives. For instance: yesterday we gave a talk at Barrack 10 (that houses new inmates) to tell them about our experience, what was the origin of this space three years ago (with reference to Matices Culturales), what needs we intend to satisfy, what we have achieved and how do we feel about it.

About the prison next door we know the same as you do. There’s a lot of disinformation. They don’t want anybody to know what it’s about. Fellow prisoners are dying and nobody cares.

AB: It was inaugurated on January 27 but it hasn’t been officially commissioned yet. The construction company is still there, so, strictly speaking, works aren’t finished. But they inaugurated it all the same. They put people inside it so they could start charging.

It’s a meat mincing machine. It’s so obvious: capitalism exploiting people’s bodies more and more. The same public-private partnership system is in place in the U.S., and what happens is that they are out there picking up people, because inmates are the raw material of the system. Without inmates, the system isn’t profitable.

This may happen in Uruguay, I mean, that all services are privatized. There was an attempt to privatize healthcare services, but they couldn’t, thanks to the resistance of large sectors. So now they’re trying with security. Capitalism is reproducing itself and taking advantage of critical sectors.

Prisons exist to protect private property, why such a large investment in prisons and not in education?

We visited Barrack 10 yesterday, and we told the people there about our activities. We talked about our ideology and what we can fight for. Because not by chance 8 out of 10 people confined here come from the same underprivileged sectors. It’s not a coincidence, it’s causality. How can we stop this? We should raise our consciousness and fight against it, resist, manage to leave this place with tools to live in society.

P2P: Has Matices Culturales found a common space to reflect on all these issues?

AB: Sure. Reflection comes while walking. We intend to transmit our reflections.

It’s not only about making music for fun. Having fun is OK, forgetting your routine, clearing up your mind. And making music is fine because music gives you a lot of

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Roundtable at Punta de Rieles Prison

opportunities to build new relationships. It’s a political position to change practices and ways of thinking.

P2P: You said “it comes while walking” in spatial terms. When somebody wants to start an enterprise, how is collective bargaining developed?

MA: In this peculiar prison, you just go and talk to the Warden (Luis Parodi) or with labor area people. We, the promoters of all this are always in contact, either in the radio, in the vegetable gardens, in the study room, in the magazine we publish, at the Co-operative (Cooperativa de Vivienda Resiliencia) seat…

The first meetings of the Co-operative were held at a fellow’s enterprise.

Then we got a room, we fixed it, we put a door, and we equipped it, always keeping in mind our commitment to the project.

The Co-operative has been in place for one year now. And we’re about to obtain legal personality. Then we’ll go on until the final stage: building our houses.

I think these collective undertakings strengthen us both as a group and as individuals. Nowadays society does not pursue collective goals but more and more individual goals.

By creating these things within the prison we want to raise awareness of the fact that we lack a lot of things. During the process we realize what we lack.

To think about these things make us think about why no high-schools are built in the outskirts, for example. No high-schools are built, but police stations are. And we realize this place is not so different from the outside.

Here, we’re doing things thinking of the outside; we can do that. These spaces help us to make reintegration into society easier. I’m building my house, I’m studying, I’m doing something with my life.

These are some of the things we learn from collective undertakings. We all have the same problems, we all share this reality, maybe our previous living conditions were the same too. We can tell our story and try to explain it, so that no more prisons like the one next door need to be built. We’re giving something to society. To go back, to go out to the street, to go back to society.

We met with the Technical Deputy Warden of the prison next door to discuss what could be done to reproduce these spaces in the other prison. Anyway, conditions are not the same. There aren’t any electronic doors here.

If 500 inmates share green, open areas within the precincts of the prison, if they have the opportunity to study, this would probably result in more people studying, working or remaking their life once released. But those 2000 people confined behind an electronic door, surrounded by loudspeakers, listening to a bell all-day long, will probably forget they are persons.

AB: The mutilation of the self, the walls, the uniform, the loss of identity, being a number, the electronic door, fixed hours to eat, fixed hours to go out to the yard: these are all indoctrination devices.

In the outside world those won’t be the conditions; these people will find another reality. So, do they succeed in making better persons? In giving them tools to experience and try new things, to open their mind and think freely?

The Technical Deputy Warden of the prison next door asked us to go there to help with cultural activities, and our answer was yes. Even if on the side of the wall, people there are our fellow inmates. We share the feeling of being confined,

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the same anguish, the same helplessness, the same anxiety, even if contexts are different. Those feelings may be somehow tempered here because we have some entertainments, but when we go to bed at night what we would like is to be with our families.

For this reason, our collective undertakings focus mainly on considering what our peers are living through. I take responsibility for my mistakes, but, who takes responsibility for my background’s mistakes that led to my mistakes? In my case, in Martín’s case, in Federico’s case, in the case of the other 10 thousand (approximate number of incarcerated people in Uruguay), who takes responsibility for all those Human Rights? Right to adequate housing, to education, to health… all the rights we were deprived of.

MA: The State does not take responsibility, the State gets rid of all responsibilities, the State prefers the public-private partnership. We realized a lot of rights are being violated… It can’t be!

It seems that we’re the only ones talking in this interview! …(Laughs) P2P: We’d like to tell you some things we’ve been thinking on these issues and we’d like to know your opinion, as we are outside observers.

On the one hand we saw a relationship between an architecture prone to consider life at an abstract level–what Adrián referred to when talking about standardization, fixed times to eat and sleep, the same clothes for everybody– and Power. An architecture at the service of Power, a relationship between the capital P Politics, the old one, the usual one, exercised always by the same people. On the other hand, we saw another architecture that favors encounters, thus contributing to establish a different relationship with the power thanks to other, maybe new, emerging politics, what makes us recognize certain empowerments.

After hearing what you’ve said we find some hope in those spaces where architecture may foster certain things, not alone, of course…

MA: I think what you’re saying is more than clear here, because the history of this prison is political. This very spot where we are now was one of the toilets of the women’s prison during the military-dictatorship (1973-1985). At present this is a place full of color, there are lots of letters and ideas written on the walls, and we are aware of that too. We are aware of what this place meant, of what it was done here, and this makes us feel persons, feel a part of something.

I believe next-door prison is quite the opposite. It’s about what you were saying on abstraction. Making someone feel alone, confined, with no bonds, so that he doesn’t feel like a person any more. Do they really want to re-socialize those persons or do they want to turn them into something worse?

I think anyone having been away from his family knows what I’m talking about. How could you assimilate if you have no contact with anybody or if you’re only in contact with people that lack the same things as you do?

There are lots of things we need at Unit No. 6, we disagree with a lot of things, and we fight to change them, but we have the opportunity to say it, to tell it.

AB: There’s no censorship here, we say what we want. No insults, no disrespect.

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Roundtable at Punta de Rieles Prison

P2P: You’re somehow the voices of the prison, aren’t you? There’s a difference between the voice that gives orders in the prison next door and your voices discussing in a radio show.

MA: We often take the radio’s loudspeakers outside so that everyone can listen to the radio shows or the music we play. Different opportunities arise from relationships, interactions, sharing or even discussions. This is part of asking ourselves why we are here.

AB: Going back to your project, what’s the current stage?

P2P: There are several stages and aspects. On the one hand, we are going to Venice to prepare the exhibition. The exhibition will try to convey, through a sensory experience, all we’ve learned here, in these two prisons.

There’s a catalogue on the exhibition, and we invited many people to write on this issue. Not all of them are architects, there’re also artists, journalists, psychologists, anthropologists… Not all of them are Uruguayan. We’ve tried to internationalize our reflection. There’s a poster within the catalogue that contains a graphical research on the architecture of both prisons.

We’re also building a website where we’ll publish different material during the Biennale.

And when we come back from Venice we’ll go on working through a University extension program housed by the School of Architecture, Design and Urbanism aimed at building together a participatory urban project for this prison. We invite everyone living here to take part of it.

AB: When are you leaving for Venice?

P2P: In May. The exhibition will run until November.

AB: And will you have everything ready in time?

P2P: As always in Uruguay, we have few resources and little time, but we’re working hard.

MA: It seems we’ve run out of time…

AB: We talked too much, but there was some exchange, wasn’t it? Our goal is to focus on other realities to be able to build our anti-fate. The prevailing ideology says we’ll end here, in prison, but in this particular prison we can get a University degree, learn a trade, become musicians… we may build another reality.

MA: So, goodbye then…

FG: From Unit No. 6 Punta de Rieles, Matices Culturales, with the show…

MA: SomoS lo que SomoS. AB: If you listen to us and you enjoy the show, please share it, you’ll be helping to spread it.

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FG: You can listen to us on radiopedal.uy, La Cotorra FM, sinretorno.com, radioutopia.com.ar, Espika FM or El Cuarto Ombú FM. P2P: Thank you very much. We’re really happy of having had this conversation with you.

AB: Thank you for coming.

“Our goal is to focus on other realities to be able to build our anti-fate” adrián baraldo

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Roundtable at punta de rieles prison

Enclosure architectures

The drawings focus on the idea of enclosure, and examine architecture as a signifier of social order.

Referencing structures that are built to enclose, encapsulate or fortify, their roots lay in an exploration of defensive and prison architecture from the period of recent conflict in the north of Ireland. In this and related geopolitical contexts, aspects of the built environment operated as an ocularcentric framework for surveillance, containment and control of subversive populations.

The structures depicted reference the architecture of prisons and military installations; constricted spaces that embody the language of armour and operate as representations of ideo-

Conor McGrady is an artist from Northern Ireland whose work examines the relationship between ideology and spatial control.

by Conor McGrady

img 02

(Text by Conor McGrady)

img 04

logical enclosure. Drawing on the visual language of modernism, these built structures fuse the modernist vision of architecture as an indicator of social progress with the language of force, secrecy and the visual domination of space. Here, hybrid architectonic structures become enclosures or quasi-monumental edifices that function as receptacles of power, and operate as defensive bulwarks against its loss.

Enclosure architectures

img 01

img 03

img 05

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* Image courtesy of the artist.

Img 05 Structure IV, Gouache on Yupo Polymer Paper, 28 x 36cm, 2012.

* Image courtesy of the artist.

Photo by Kevin Noble.

Img 04 Red Cell, Gouache on Paper, 28 x 36cm, 2012.

* Image courtesy of the artist.

Img 03 Restriction, Gouache on Yupo Polymer Paper, 28 x 36cm, 2014.

* Image courtesy of the artist.

Img 02 Retreat I- Series 2, Gouache on Translucent Yupo Polymer Paper, 59 x 89cm, 2014.

* Image courtesy of the artist.

Photo by Kevin Noble.

Img 01 The Nation Builders, Gouache on Paper, 244 x 379cm, 2010.

An intellectual (whose work is worth reading) is more necessary than ever Francesco Perrotta-Bosch: master’s degree in architecture, essay writer, critic and curator in architecture. He coordinated the team in charge of research and assembly of the Coleção Arquitetura Brasileira da Casa de Arquitetura in Portugal, 2017. He was curatorial assistant of the Brazilian Pavilion at the International Architecture Exhibition at the 2016 Venice Biennale, and assistant curator of the exhibitions: “Conjunto Habitacional” and “Lutar. Ocupar.

Resistir” of Studio X. He is a member of the architecture jury of Asociación Paulista de Críticos de Arte”.

“Formless A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a

matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.”01 Georges Bataille

Should we admit that “the universe resembles nothing and is only formless” we will realize that any human construction, either in the material or the intellectual level, is not an absolute truth.

Or indestructible. Or even eternal. Men build taxonomy of everything in the universe in order to own it. Taxonomy is the practice of giving form to any content. But forms are not the contents themselves. If organizing, categorizing, cataloguing and ordering are mechanisms to stop knowledge –the “mathematical frock coat”–, it is equally valid to encourage disruption of such order. This is the bataillean operation of déclasser: to declassify. This is where the pertinence of the formless lies.

01 BATAILLE, Georges. Documents. 1929. In: BOIS, Yve-Alain; KRAUSS, Rosalind. Formless. A User’s Guide. New York: Zone Books, 1997. p.5.

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An intellectual (whose work is worth reading) is more necessary than ever

These terms give rise to a discussion on which is the most stimulating stance to the world of an intellectual (whose work is worth reading). When can we say that individuals who give their opinion on the state of things (ignoring the authors of posts and tweets) are fulfilling their role properly?

The founding act is to adopt a position. Not any position, but that which questions common sense and does not fall in the comfort of the commonplace.

That which requires a non-servile attitude before the powerful, let alone before personal ambition. Adopting a position is incompatible with the submission to the politically correct and the alignment with the majority –by the way, this description is highly subjective as the majorities of a national electorate, of a professional class, or of the bubble of colleagues connected to your social networks are different-; all the while, these majorities are equally harmful for an intellectual (whose work is worth reading). To a certain extent, it is necessary to swim against the tide. Adopting a position is an act of reply. Of opposition.02 It is necessary to take the rather uncomfortable antagonistic position that to some extent, resembles that of the polemicist. Undoubtedly, it moves away from the comfort of the merely festive. Ultimately, an intellectual (whose work is worth reading) contradicts unanimities and heroes, provokes transgression of (for some people) convenient conventions, overthrow of the status quo, disruption of procedures, breaking of rules, destruction of myths. These targets are not attempted as actions of personal vanity but as generous acts to find new liberties, id est., fields of thought devoid of restrictions –always disguised as truths or certainties- established by society itself.

Therefore, the objective of an intellectual (whose work is worth reading) is to raise doubts in the reader.

To challenge something greater than oneself03. To make some people challenge what they had taken as certainty. To communicate that a certain fact or situation is a problem. The first step to solve it will always be to acknowledge it. The ultimate purpose is to stimulate – sometimes, even to trigger- public debate.

“Architecture Architecture is the expression of the very soul of societies, just as human physiognomy is the expression of the individual’s souls. It is, however, particularly to the physiognomies of official personages (prelate, magistrates, admirals) that this comparison pertains. In fact it is only the ideal soul of society, that which has the authority to command and prohibit, that is expressed in architectural compositions properly speaking. Thus great monuments are erected like dikes, opposing the logic and majesty of authority against all disturbing elements: it is in the form of cathedral or palace that Church or State speaks to the multitudes and imposes silence upon them. It is, in fact, obvious that monuments inspire social prudence and often even real fear. The taking of the Bastille is symbolic of this state of things: it is hard to explain this crowd movement other than by the animosity of the people against the monuments that are their real masters. [...]

It is obvious, moreover, that mathematical organization imposed on stone is none other than the completion of an evolution of earthly forms, whose meaning is given, in the biological order, by the passage of the simian to the human form, the latter already presenting all the elements of architecture. In morphological progress men apparently represent only an intermediate stage between monkeys and great edifices. Forms have become more and more static, more and more dominant.

The human order from the beginning is, just as easily, bound up with architectural order, which is no more than its development. And if one attacks architecture, whose monumental productions are at present the real masters of the world, grouping servile multitudes in their shadows, imposing admiration and astonishment, order and constraint, one is, as it were, attacking man. [...]”04 Georges Bataille

02 It should be noted that not all is subject to criticism: therefore, it is essential to select what is worth criticizing. Nor all requires a public opinion –in some cases, refraining from giving an opinion (or even ignoring someone’s opinion) expresses a stronger position.

03 There is always the risk of being quixotic or of falling into a propagandistic discourse. And the risk of grandiloquence and exhaustiveness. By the way, perhaps these are the problems of this essay supporting an intellectual (whose work is worth reading), written by me, a non-intellectual (whose work perhaps is not worth reading).

04 BATAILLE, Georges. Documents. 1929. In: HOLLIER, Denis. Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille. Cambridge: The MIT Press,1992. p.46-54.

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Order is an eminently architectural action. For Bataille, architecture formats the networks of human relationships that build communities, establishes systems that bring people together, gives meaning to what is produced by and for more than one individual. Defining meanings is the same as introducing models. These models regulate the social body and “imposes silence on the masses”. According to this interpretation, architecture is, therefore, the materialization of power.

The taking of the Bastille is the primeval fact that Bataille sets up to trigger a debate on architecture. In other words, the taking of a prison is the starting point for a critical view of architecture.

In the first paragraphs of his book Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, Denis Hollier gives an explanation of this issue: “There have been endless arguments over whether the origin of architecture was the house, the temple or the tomb. For Bataille it was the prison.05” His notion of architecture is associated to repression.

It is closer to the notion of monument, but mainly as a symbol of authoritarian representation. Leading someone to believe that architecture would be the authority is the same as saying that architecture is a symbol of institution.

Going back to the dissection of the quote, special attention should be paid to this part of the text: “And if one attacks architecture [...] one is, as it were, attacking man”. The French philosopher does not attack the man inside or outside an architectural construction: the attack is against the architecture inside man. It responds to the condition of the body subjugated by power. Then, we have a fight against the conventions, labels, habits, customs, protocols, praxis and rules that we are taught to apply on ourselves. This is a battle against determinism: the fight to liberate individual behaviors from models (directly or indirectly) imposed onto them by the authority. Repression of human nature. Bataille is opposing the idea of “make himself an architectural composition”06.

The architecture problematized here is human form.

The aim –or what is taught or even imposed- is the right model for that human form. The man confined into a body willing to reach perfection. Therefore, writing about human form is to get into the field of idealism.

Not by chance, Bataille says that in his opinion, architecture “is only the ideal soul of society”.

Thus, the critical view of architecture is the permanent battle against idealism. An intellectual (whose work is worth reading) should attack idealism.

Now it seems rather obvious to note that, according to Bataille, architecture is not made by architects. Architecture speaks of physiology, physiognomy, economics, politics, of everything and everyone. Even when related to the construction of buildings, the role of the architect is not that of the great author. An architect is far from being the demiurge responsible for the creation, and plays a minor role, that of a translator materializing authorities.

No less important is to consider that Georges Bataille’s notion of architecture as the representation of authority, as synonymous with institution, should also be repositioned within the parameters shaping the present; otherwise, we will reach a hurried conclusion on the mismatch of Bataille’s notion. From 1929 to 2018 the meanings of architecture and institution have changed.

Ultimately, what is the form of an institution of the 21st. century? In the light of the speed of contemporary life, institutions do not need static, long-lasting solutions any more, let alone the (sometimes incredible) desire of being eternal. If, on the one hand, control systems have been dematerialized, on the other hand, systems have become more complex and disseminated. Should we rely on the idea of architecture as a structure of order and attraction of a wide group of persons, we will conclude that never in human history architecture has been so present as it is today. If we transpose Bataille’s notions to the 21st. century, his great architect would be Mark Zuckerberg. His architecture would be Facebook, Google, Instagram, Bordering the irresponsibility of an assumption, I believe that Bataille would hardly recognize as architecture anything at this Biennale.

Acknowledging this fracture between architect and architecture, the very core of the profession is threatened.

The discussion of basilar issues is reopened. Which is the present role of the architect? Which is the role that the architect could have in the future? Which is his real power? Bataillean disruption may lead us to think in the end of the architect’s legitimacy as we know it today; meanwhile, at the same time, its shows us that thinking of architecture is essential to reflect on Humanity. This criticism of architecture is an irrefutable foundation for an intellectual (whose work is worth reading).

05 HOLLIER, Denis. Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992. p.IX. 06 BOIS, Yve-Alain. Threshole. In: BOIS, Yve-Alain; KRAUSS, Rosalind. Formless. A User’s Guide. New York: Zone Books, 1997. p.5.

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An intellectual (whose work is worth reading) is more necessary than ever

Prison Images

A film composed of images from prisons. Quotes from fiction films and documentaries as well as footage from surveillance cameras. A look at the new control technologies, at personal identification devices, electronic ankle bracelets, electronic tracking devices.

The cinema has always been attracted to prisons. Today’s prisons are full of video surveillance cameras. These images are unedited and monotonous; as neither time nor space is compressed, they are particularly well-suited to conveying the state of inactivity into which prisoners are placed as a punitive measure. The surveillance cameras show the norm and reckon with deviations from it. Clips from films by Genet and Bresson. Here the prison appears as a site of sexual infraction, a site

Harun Farocki was a German filmmaker, critic, theorist and curator.

by Harun Farocki

(Text by Harun Farocki)

where human beings must create themselves as people and as workers.

In Un Chant d’amour by Jean Genet, the guard looks in on inmates in their cells and sees them masturbating. The inmates are aware that they are being watched and thus become performers in a peep show. The protagonist in Bresson’s Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé turns the objects of imprisonment into the tools of his escape. These topoi appear in many prison films. In newer prisons, in contrast, contemporary video surveillance technology aims at demystification.

Prison images

img 03

img 01

img 02

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Prison Images © Harun Farocki, 2000. Texts taken from the film. Images courtesy of Harun Farocki Institut.

img 02 “The parade of the prisoners suggests a procession, a military parade, a triumphal march.

The camera through which they pass assumed the place of God, the king and the chief of the army”.

img 01 “They pass by the guards in a double row. After following, it is perceived if they obey or resist.

These images are from a movie or a series of images from the 1920s in Germany. Archived with the title ‘on the sidelines of the road’”.

img 07 “The new Marion prison looks like a nuclear power plant, an airport, and also a factory. It is located

img 06 “After accepting the lowest budget, the soil begins to be prepared, and the works begin. The euphoric music of the future sounds, as if a dam were built. But it’s the production of concrete slabs to build the Marion Prison, in the state of Illinois”.

img 05 “This film clearly adopts the point of view of a prisoner, and not clearly the point of view of the guards.

He has to reinvent techniques.

He has to turn the spoon into a lever, handle, hammer or screwdriver. This remember the history of tools: this is also an anthropological project”.

img 04 “In this film by Jean Genet the guard observes the cells, and observes the prisoners’ sexual lives. Although they behave as if they were alone, the prisoners are aware that he is watching them. As women in the peep-shows. Prison is a place of prohibitions, secrets and transgressions. Of the desired and imagined”.

img 03 “The prisoners in cell 131 resist to be observed.

They cover the metal door of their cell with a mattress.

The guards can’t allow it.

Video cameras multiply the perspective of control. His cold eye must illustrate the prison, demystify it”.

img 11 “These points represent the prisoners, they have an electronic emitter in the ankle. You can select a prisoner and know his identity.

The identity”.

img 10 “We know the surveillance cameras of the supermarkets. There, they first had the function of preventing theft, and then of analyzing the consumption of the customers. In this simulation, the small squares symbolize the customers who are in the corridors of a supermarket. It is about knowing which road the clients choose. The greater the distance, the greater the contact with the products, and the higher the chances of a spontaneous purchase”.

img 09 “Prison technology.

A biometric device to control access. Identification of iris.

Surveillance cameras”.

img 08 “I should consult thousands of scenes in all the world’s archives where prisoners were released. This man goes empty-handed in the direction of the flag. If we had all the scenes in which a prisoner is released, we could compose an image of liberation.”

outside the city, like a shopping center. The old prisons are located within the city, in full view of everyone. The building itself is a warning of punishment. New prisons are located in no man’s land”.

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Prison images

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img 13 “The exercise of power and violence must be constantly trained. Today, power and violence seem almost always impersonal. Like baking bread or killing cattle, the exercise of face-to-face power is no longer usual”.

img 12 “Thousands of movies represent this: under surveillance, love has to find a particular expression. It is said that love is an improbability. But an improbability we take into account. Thousands of cameras monitor visits in prison: one day, any expression imaginable will be recorded on the tapes.

Here, man and woman can only touch their hands. This couple broke the rules: the prisoner will be expelled from the room”.

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img 15 “With this technology any room can become a prison. This can eliminate the prison. The fixed place where to be marginal. Since there were several newspaper articles, in prisons in California the prisoners are no longer shot when they fight. Now the agitators are shot with water mixed with tear gas, from devices directed from the cameras that point at them”.

img 14 “This is the courtyard of the Corcoran Prison, a concrete wedge, without any vegetation. Behind the window, the armed guards, and above, the camera. The visual axis and the axis of shot coincide”.

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An interview to Luis Parodi Warden of Unit 6, Punta de Rieles prison

Prison to Prison (P2P): How was this project conceived?

Luis Parodi (LP): I was working at INAU (Uruguayan Institute for Children and Adolescents) and I was offered the position of warden of this prison. I started working here, I implemented some of my ideas, and I realized that things were very clear in my mind. This project is the synthesis of what I’ve been doing for 30 years. I’ve got the feeling that many things that have been around all the time (authors, people, experiences) are condensed in the materialization of this village. This idea of a village reinforces my ideological beliefs, derived from accumulated experience.

My friends say that human beings believe in their adolescence throughout their lives. As I spent my adolescence at Tupambaé (a village in Cerro Largo) they say I’m recreating the village where I lived this period of my life.

Feel free to choose any of both explanations.

P2P: The strategy consists of imitating the outside as much as possible…

LP: The underlying idea is that the more prison resembles reality (if I may use the euphemism) the closer these guys will be of living reality. And by living it, they may change. That’s our intention. The change depends on them. We want the prison to resemble the outside as much as possible to reduce the impact of the outside on the inside.

In turn, prison allows the outside to go through it, in order to abandon the prison’s futile internal discussion. At the risk of repeating myself, I’d like to point out this prison is like a village; if nobody comes from the outside, if no salesman arrives to the village, we’ll end up discussing the same issues all the time. In villages time doesn’t go by. There’re no events, so time doesn’t go by. At Punta de Rieles, provided there are events, provided there’s a “before” and an “afterwards”, time starts going by, and at that moment we start the change process, the educational process.

P2P: And the outside you’re trying to imitate is Montevideo.

LP: It’s the society we live in, the capitalist society, so the same rules apply here.

It’s not Montevideo; we intend to imitate life outside. We take the village life because we’re 600 people; if we were 15, we’d be country people. Being 600, we turn into a neighborhood. People call it neighborhood but I think it’s more like a village..

Village mess should go to prison, and prison should learn to solve the mess in a democratic way. My obsession: that disputes may be resolved democratically.

Otherwise, we end up in a dictatorship, as it happened before.

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An interview to Luis Parodi

“Village mess should go to prison, and prison should learn to solve the mess in a democratic way”.

P2P: When you started the project, what buildings and infrastructure were already here?

LP: All the barracks and two businesses, the Warden’s office and the cell block.

Everything else was built later.

P2P: Was it an “organic” growth?

LP: It was developed to cope with the need for creating jobs and a communal living; there wasn’t much planning, actually.

P2P: The streets were already there…

LP: The street layout remained the same. Streets are in a worse condition than in those days, but the layout is the same. We’d like to create a street behind the sawmill, to reach the other street, the one that takes to the high-school.

P2P: When you first arrived here, was the Police inside the premises?

LP: No, corrections officers were civilians, but they walked around with police officers. They imposed penalties all the time, no matter the reason. For example: there was this rule, “not going out after 6.30 p.m.”. One day, an inmate told one of our co-workers: “My clothes are on the clothesline, you know”. And she told him: “Ok, I’ll go with you”. And she was shot with a rubber bullet. The guards in the watchtowers had shot her!

P2P: The watchtowers have been abandoned…

LP: They’ve been abandoned since I arrived here. They should be part of your urban project.

P2P: We would like to include them in our architectural intervention, assigning them a new function.

LP: We welcome that. What new function? That’s going to drive you crazy.

We’ve always wanted to turn those watchtowers into something related to our project. Their meaning was obvious in the past: a guard standing there with a gun; everybody knew why he was there. Maybe you didn’t agree, but there was a guard there that shot you a rubber bullet if you didn’t do certain things. We removed the guards but watchtowers are still there.

P2P: Their being abandoned has a meaning too…

LP: It’s a message. We should give that message a meaning in line with our project.

We abandoned the old meaning but we haven’t been able to develop a new one. I’d thought of painting murals on them, I even talked with the School of Fine Arts, but that idea came to nothing.

Please do brainstorm freely, maybe crazy ideas will save us. Perhaps we’re able to implement the most foolish idea, why not? Let’s dream. Then we’ll find out

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if we have the guts to do, if we’re capable of overcoming our ideological prejudices and material limitations.

Fortunately, we didn’t demolish watchtowers. History shouldn’t be denied, but we shouldn’t be doomed to live in the past either. “Let me go, you past!” It’s a fascinating issue how much of the past remains. We should actually discuss the extent of our conservatism.

P2P: Going back to life in the village, if I were an inmate and wanted to start a business, who should I talk to about the space where to develop it? To you?

LP: You should talk with people in the labor area. I used to be in charge, because I was the Technical Deputy Warden. My general idea was to have an industrial area and a service area. Now there’s a Labor Board. The guy hands out a piece of paper, they meet and decide where and how. Then, the guy has to find materials, ask the Fund for a loan…

P2P: Talking about the Fund, what’s the economic system within this prison?

LP: Every business contributes a percentage of their earnings to a Common Fund entirely allocated to loans. The Fund is entitled to lend money to inmates who present a project. Up to 120 thousand pesos have been lent. It’s a non-interest bearing fund, because we don’t care about interest bearing. If the inmate doesn’t pay, he can’t be sent to prison, he’s already there.

This is their money, it’s not public money. A percentage of their earnings goes to the Ministry of the Interior, a percentage to the Fund and a percentage is used to pay vendors.

The Fund went through a crisis, we lived some unhappy situations. It’s really hard for these people to hold to an idea. Well, it’s also hard for us to support institutions, meetings, ideas. We should discuss again with everybody in the prison whether they still want the Fund, and what for…

P2P: The Fund is an inmate organization…

LP: Yes. The Fund is run by two inmates elected by their peers, together with a member of our team, because they are not allowed to handle money.

The idea was mine but implemented by the inmates. Some of them didn’t sleep for three days, they spent all night studying how banks all over the world operate; finally, they submitted a proposal: audit committee, articles of incorporation, how loans would be granted, everything. We weren’t able to implement their project in full. This is something that happens at the institutional level, these initiatives are hard to support, they fall apart.

“At some point we realized there were two zones in the village: an up here and a down there.

It’s a social issue”.

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P2P: How is money circulation organized?

LP: We pay the vendors, we pay salaries. Then inmates turn this money into tickets for internal circulation or to be sent to their families.

P2P: As for negotiations about space, we’ve realized there’re some general urban strategies supporting decision-making…

An interview to Luis Parodi

LP: At some point we realized there were two zones in the village: an “up here” and a “down there”. It’s a social issue. So we thought we should move things “down there”. We took services there, the high-school, some industries…

P2P: Did that difference arise on an organic basis?

LP: Yes it did, and they still feel it. There’s still a lot to be done. What we’ve done so far is to take some services there. At present there’re more services “down there” than “up here”. We moved the grocery store (a business that failed), we moved the high school. They’ve got a confectionery business, Gigor bakery (the biggest business), the recycling plant…

But they’ve got this inevitable feeling of being next to power, the feeling you have when you’re near decision-making (the prison’s “up there” is near the main square, the entrance gate and the Warden’s office). That’s why people living downtown have more power than people living in Casavalle (in the outskirts of Montevideo): the City Hall is just two blocks away.

We’ve made a lot of improvements, but traditions are strong. Over the time we’ve learnt that culture is not linear, things aren’t going to change because you have changed. People’s sensations last for a long time.

P2P: Are inmates allowed to move freely from 7 in the morning to 6 in the afternoon?

LP: No. The idea is not that inmates hang out doing nothing. If they have nothing to do, they stay at the barrack. They go out with a purpose: to go to work, to practice sports, to study, to share a mate, but they don’t go out to wander around. We try to organize the activities; inmates go out with a purpose; if they have nothing to do, they stay at the barrack. If they don’t work, they don’t go to the grocery store and that’s it.

P2P: How are common spaces managed?

LP: Common spaces are the result of a long process. The first event took place at the meeting hall in the cell block. The following, at the soccer field. Then, at the square…

P2P: What do you mean by “events”? Something like the one we attended on Sunday?

LP: Cultural (as the other day’s) or political events. There are two political events a year. One, on June 27, when the women that were incarcerated here during the military dictatorship visit us. The other one when we close the year; it’s a sort of rendering of accounts. We give them account of our actions and they give us account of theirs. And they all take part. Inmates are always the ones closing the event.

P2P: Is there also a music band show?

LP: No, I don’t agree with that. A political event is just that, a political event. There are some social events as well. For example, collective meetings organized by the Housing Co-operative. I truly believe that those spaces are really meaningful too.

When we lose those spaces -as is happening in Montevideo- I get really angry. When public spaces are abandoned to carelessness, we all lose. That’s why we’re

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“We’re trying to build a democratic coexistence, we’re trying to offer these citizens the democracy they never enjoyed: they were never part of a democracy. It’s just that”.

trying to replicate public spaces inside the prison. Here everybody goes to watch soccer matches.

We’re trying to build a democratic coexistence, we’re trying to offer these citizens the democracy they never enjoyed: they were never part of a democracy. It’s just that. We want to help them find a new place where they can struggle for life, find a different role. Their current place in society means stealing to struggle for life, and we want them to play a different role.

P2P: As for maintenance of common spaces, is it difficult to make inmates understand that to embellish a prison is not just embellishing a prison but common spaces as well?

LP: This has been really hard. I think there’s been an improvement in the care of space. A high price has been paid for this achievement, because if these guys are transferred to another prison, they’ll probably be killed for having taken care of a prison. However, we should all care for the space we all live in.

P2P: What do you mean by saying “they’ll be killed” in another prison?

LP: Guys are afraid of going back, it’s understandable. The other day they almost killed a guy that used to work at the bakery, where he had a managing position. He was released, he committed a robbery and he was convicted again. He was sent to another prison, and there he was beaten up for having been in charge of other inmates.

P2P: How are individual spaces like?

LP: That’s another aspect of prisons to which not much thought is given. There are not individual places, but people need to be alone sometimes. There’s no possibility of being alone here, and that drives me mad. It’s really harmful for inmates. The only individual places in prisons are punishment cells. Isolation is considered a punishment.

P2P: By the way, what do you think of Unit No. 1?

LP: It’s terrifying. It’s something from before the 18th century. It’s Foucault in his Discipline and Watch and Punish version. There’s no mystery: an absurd operation. Anyway, I wish them luck.

It’s absence of activity. They get up a 7 o’clock, and by 9 o’clock they have nothing else to do. And they are penalized for doing nothing. But if that’s the only thing they are offered… They’re offered table tennis? How long can you play table tennis if you have nothing else to do? Just a day or two.

I’m worried because a lot of deaths will occur. An inmate has already died. They brought first-time offenders there. First-time offenders confined are a problem. They’re the most difficult inmates to work with, because adapting to prison takes time.

How much did it take us to adapt to school when we were kids? Nobody wanted to go to school; we all wanted to go out to play. Nobody did ever assess the cost of this, just the profit. How much did you leave behind to adapt to the school room? When you’re 5 what you want is to go out to play, you don’t want to be sitting in a school room. You attend school because your parents take you there, because society says you must go if you want to be someone. It’s all part of the social apparatus.

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An interview to Luis Parodi

That’s why the model next door is outdated. We Uruguayans are like Italians, like Spaniards, we like eating spaghetti on Sundays and speaking badly of neighbors.

Americans have a very clear idea about prisons. They’re only concerned about prisoners being in prison. A lot of technology and no thought on relationships. You speak to Americans about relationships and they give you a really weird look.

Both approaches are diametrically opposed. This doesn’t mean there’s nothing to improve in our prison. They’re two different perspectives. This doesn’t mean we’re OK here and over there it’s a disaster.

Honestly, I see nothing that can be recovered over there, I can’t find a way to do it. I think it doesn’t make sense.

P2P: What do you think of these two completely different schemes sharing a dividing wall within the same prison system?

“Human beings and their circumstances. If circumstances improve, human beings improve”.

LP: It’s hard to explain. I think that we are the (crazy) exception to the opinion prevailing in society; we’ll be kicked out anytime now. That’s the core of the ideological quantum. Society is not out in the street claiming for inmates to be treated well.

On the contrary, society reinforces that approach, even if it failed two thousand years ago. Being there is like being confined in any other prison in Uruguay but in better facilities. They’re locked up 24/7: it’s still confinement.

Some cells have already been destroyed. And worst of all: someone is going to say inmates don’t deserve the new building because they break it all, but nobody is going to question the model.

When I say this model can’t work I don’t mean it should work as our prison does. I don’t think ours is the only way of running a prison. No way, but confinement without any activity whatsoever only entails tragedy. Inmates don’t have any opportunity to make decisions.

P2P: Considering the relationship between architecture and Power in the model next door, we think in this village-like prison those that had always been excluded have been somehow empowered through daily life in a unique urban context…

LP: That’s the idea, that’s the intention, that guys are able to live an experience that gives them back Uruguayan democracy. To achieve this they must be empowered from an urban perspective, from an ideological perspective and from a political perspective.

I learned here that if we offer the proper conditions, the other will necessary grow. Human beings and their circumstances. If circumstances improve, human beings improve. Circumstances are urban and working conditions, being able to sleep peacefully, having dignity, eating well.

I want life inside here to have a sense, as lower middle-class as possible. We have endowed inmates with some dignity, but there’s still a lot to be done. Comfort should improve. We’re very poor, but there’s still some hope.

I believe in fight, I believe human beings learn from confrontation, from discussion, from struggle. Education means exchanging perspectives. When we discuss about prejudices, ideas, values, politics, with other people, we learn. That’s the point.

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An interview to Juan Miguel Petit Parliamentary Commissioner for the Prison System

Prison to Prison (P2P): Would you please let us know what the role of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Prison System is?

Juan Miguel Petit (JMP): The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Prison System responds to an office created in 2005 for the parliamentary monitoring of human rights observance within the Uruguayan prison system, in compliance with domestic and international rules. The Commissioner has access to the whole prison system, is authorized to visit the premises, carry out general inspections and make recommendations to promote human rights. The Commissioner reports to the Parliament, is bound to submit one annual report and special reports, and, at the same time, operates as a preventive mechanism.

P2P: As for the monitoring of human rights within prisons, the 2009 UN’s Report of the Special Rapporteur on Torture in Uruguay marked a breaking point. Which was the situation of Uruguayan prisons at that time?

JMP: In 2009 Uruguay had an old-fashioned prison system, inherited from a quite innovative system that dated back to the 1950s. Originally, this system depended from the Ministry of Education and Culture and its officers were not police officers. Soon before the military dictatorship (1973-1985) the management of the prison system passed to the Police. It was not changed nor updated afterwards. So, the prison system continued operating within the Ministry of the Interior under an extremely old organization scheme.

In 2010 some major changes started and the prison system reform became a matter of discussion. For instance, the National Prison Rehabilitation Institution (INR) was created, the civil service management structure was incorporated, healthcare within prisons was made available, and some new initiatives started to be implemented, as Unit No. 6 Punta de Rieles. This is the current situation. The full picture of the prison system is still highly heterogeneous; very different realities coexist, and the new approaches being implemented are not even aligned. Encouraging initiatives and black holes exist. There are still important unresolved matters.

P2P: So, what’s the system’s current situation?

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An interview to Juan Miguel Petit

“This is a transition and defining time.

Many aspects have improved, others haven’t. There is a permanent arm wrestle between the new and the old”.

JMP: This is a transition and defining time. Many aspects have improved, others haven’t. There is a permanent arm wrestle between the new and the old. Some experiments have been implemented, such as the new prison under the public-private partnership management, or new experiences such as Punta de Rieles, that need to consolidate before we can say it’s a conquered area.

There is still a lot to be defined, there are a lot of old problems, a lot of unsatisfied needs; for example, the need for technical teams for social or family care, psychological and psychiatric care, drug-addiction care, job training or educational opportunities, that are still not enough.

While there have been improvements in many areas, those same areas still lag behind, especially if compared with Uruguay records in other social policy areas. I think prison system indicators are quite below other indicators. Uruguay ranks 22nd in the list of countries with higher number of incarcerated people; this is striking and we should know the reason: some social conflicts are being resolved through prison, what causes lots of problems.

At first, we had an old-fashioned model; then a massive growth in prison population (tripled in less than 15 years) occurred. With the addition of new serious social issues such as social exclusion, drug trafficking, school dropout in most vulnerable sectors, etc., we are clearly facing the perfect storm.

P2P: Do you think something is being learned from the experiences you point out as positive in the reports, or they are just being accumulated without further analysis?

JMP: I think we have learned a lot. But we, Uruguayans, are very competitive players. We are few people, our country is almost empty, and for this reason competition in certain areas is really hard. And it’s sometimes hard to acknowledge success and progress. The same happens at the institutional level. Institutional learning somehow responds to this cultural characteristic as well.

Several institutions show positive features: Punta de Rieles (Unit n°6), Juan Soler, Durazno, Artigas, Salto, Comcar Industrial Pole. It’s still hard to recognize and take the good things to build a model on that basis. Then yes, I think some, but not all, experiences are being accumulated.

P2P: You have always sustained that imitating the outside within the prisons is a positive strategy.

JMP: Yes, even if this is not an idea of my own; it’s historically been that way.

This “standardization” principle is included in the Nelson Mandela Rules, United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. It’s a cornerstone establishing that the more life in prisons resembles life outside of prisons, the lower the recidivism rate will be.

The great achievement of some facilities is they’ve managed to recreate a living environment similar to society, and profit from this environment to give the inmates tools that will help them to live in the outside world. There’s an old saying that states that you can’t train a soccer player inside a lift: you can’t prepare a person to live in liberty, in confinement.

It’s easy to say but hard to apply. But I truly believe that good living conditions save people from falling into violence. Of course, we also need special

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treatments, but these treatments, if not accompanied by a meaningful -not free of conflicts, but meaningful- coexistence, don’t work.

P2P: Which is, in your opinion, the role of space and its material layout within this approach or within a more punitive one?

JMP: I think that in these rather unexplored aspects we should learn from what is being done and think about the progresses being attained.

We are still too tied to the “prison places” scheme, and we lack knowledge about architectural design. Architecture is thought to live in society with others, and prison is thought to live in a very particular way; it’s almost an oxymoron, a contradiction in itself.

I think architecture is very important. The designs applied by us are really very coarse, and this undoubtedly matters. It’s not like those Japanese capsule hotels providing basic overnight accommodation, where the capsule design is not that important. Inmates spend many hours in these spaces, many hours thinking under very particular sensitive conditions.

P2P: Talking about Punta de Rieles, how would you explain the current situation, the overlapping of such different approaches?

JMP: Your question makes me think about this issue. I think the reason of overlapping is that the new approach is being developed on the go and is not completely defined yet. And this is why opposite approaches coexist. This is not the only example.

In this case, opposition is evident because, by chance, both experiences are being developed next to each other. When you look at the new prison from the old Punta de Rieles prison, it seems you’re looking at a Texas mega-prison. And when you look at the old one from the new one, it seems that you are looking at the outskirts of Montevideo. They are very different indeed.

There are positive and negative aspects. One negative aspect is that there isn’t a clearly defined approach; instead, very different approaches coexist and this may produce opposing forces that cancel each other out. One positive aspect is that we perceive that there’s a will to do things, there’s a will to change the prison system; not everything is dead. Things are moving on.

“When you look at the new prison from the old Punta de Rieles prison, it seems you’re looking at a Texas mega-prison”.

P2P: You’ve been able to visit both prisons at Punta de Rieles. We could only visit one. Could you tell us what do you think about the new one?

JMP: I haven’t talked much about the new prison because I’d rather wait until it’s well established, proved, adjusted. It’s a really new experience. We should wait; it’s too soon to draw any conclusions.

I’ve taken lots of notes, and I’ve already submitted some of them. I think some adjustments should be made, mainly in order to create a living environment with educational and integrations features. To fulfill this principle several adjustments would be necessary.

P2P: In view of these foreign prison schemes, it seems that our society finds it difficult to develop its own approaches.

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An interview to Juan Miguel Petit

“...the ideal prison would be that creating an environment as less prison-like as possible”.

JMP: The new approach (currently operational) is the result of a very long process. No institutional stakeholder presented any different approach or alternative. This is a weakness of our society: its low capacity to make proposals when looking for solutions.

It’s the difference between a tailor-made suit and an off-the-rack suit. This solution solves a number of problems that seemed too difficult to solve, such as maintenance, food, clothes, cleaning and financing. It was an effort to innovate, to change a neglected prison reality. That’s positive, but I’m very careful when it comes to evaluation.

P2P: Following the example of the off-the-rack suit, the signature of the agreement entailed the purchase of the architectural design…

JMP: The design has undergone some adjustments and modifications. We expect that Uruguay, where everything is toned down, tones some aspects of this foreign design down as well. Actually, this has already been done in the past months. For example, no hot water was to be supplied in the prison, but this was modified on account of Uruguayan habit to drink mate. Some details are related to our life and culture, while others are of a structural nature.

P2P: Finally, in your opinion, what’s the ideal prison system?

JMP: I wouldn’t know how to answer that question, I don’t know that much. But in my opinion the ideal prison would be that creating an environment as less prison-like as possible. I refer to good Uruguayan and foreign experiences of manageable scales; small, customized prisons combining a certain environment with a specific work, always within the framework of positive coexistence.

Humankind took 18 centuries to create prisons as we know them. We’ve been living with this monster for 2 centuries. When Chinese were asked their opinion about the French Revolution, historians answered it was a very interesting event, but that it was too early to draw any conclusions. The same could be said on prisons.

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img 06

Everyday life scenes of the village-like prison.

Aiming to mirror the dynamics of the outside world, this one-of-a-kind model shows us a world known by everybody: walking pedestrians, random encounters in the streets, delivery trucks, working areas, community orchards and squares. From above, we are able to see an unexpected public space full of movement, shapes and textures, which is not that different from what you could see in the outskirts of Montevideo.

by Prison to Prison

img 05

The village-like prison from above

img 01

img 10

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img 08 Concrete block factory and old watchtower.

img 07 Industrial Area.

img 06 Roads and orchards.

img 05 Roads and orchards.

img 04 Tree lined square and passing truck.

img 03 Encounter and bifurcation of roads.

img 02 Bakery, football field, orchards and street.

img 01 Main pavilion and one of the visiting areas.

The village-like prison from above

img 09

img 02

img 08

img 12

img 03

img 11

img 04

*Images by Prison to Prison, with Gambeta FotografĂ­a.

img 12 Main square.

img 11 Main square.

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img 10 Access area and people walking.

img 09 Concrete block factory and road.

These photos were taken on three visits made to Unit No.6 of Punta de Rieles by the Prison To Prison project.

Most of them are images of the daily lives of the people who live in this centre, as well as productive and recreational activities that transform a prison landscape into one that quite resembles a small town.

Agustín Fernández is a Uruguayan documentary and journalist photographer.

The perimeter fence, the abandoned watchtowers and the brand new Unit No.1 remind us where we are, and that there are also other models of deprivation of liberty. One of these visits was during a Festival to raise funds for the ‘Cooperativa de Vivienda Resiliencia’, integrated by inmates of Unit No.6 looking for a housing solution once they are released. Hot-dogs, hamburgers, desserts and several performances of different artists were the excuse to support this initiative.

by Agustín Fernández

Festival in the village *Images by Agustín Fernández, from Prison to Prison.

Festival in the village

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As a human being, student and prison inmate, over the course of my life I have been through a lot of different situations which have taught me that nothing happens by accident, everything has a meaning.

Prisons are one of the hardest total institutions, where those of us who go through it are pierced by an endless amount of situations that are far away from reality and also far from the provisions of Article 26 of the Uruguayan Constitution. A person cannot be rehabilitated if you isolate them from society, if you prevent them from being in contact with their loved ones, or if you dehumanise them. As a university student, I have come to realise of the meaning and the purpose of prisons. It is important to understand

Martín Amande is from Montevideo, hi is an inmate of Unit n. 6 of Punta de Rieles, a psychology student at the Universidad de la República Oriental del Uruguay, and a believer in the power of community. He is also an activist and a founder of the Cooperativa de Vivienda Resiliencia and the cultural center Matices Culturales. He believes in education as the source of social change.

by Martín Amande

that ignorance makes us tame and manageable, which is why education is the most important tool to reinsert inmates into society.

Architecture is a part of this system. It is what we see, what we live, and where we live, so its importance cannot be ignored. The new construction of a prison in Punta de Rieles (Unit No.1) goes in the opposite direction of what the world thinks a prison should be. On the other side of the fence there rises a shocking, cold, concrete monster which is omnipotent to everything around it.

There are big differences between both systems, one which allows us to be and do, while the other one uses every control mechanism available and naturalises violence and humiliation to “rehab”, forgetting that the only thing that enables us to thrive are relationships and the awareness that we live in a world that sometimes we do not understand.

In this photographs, I tried to portray some of the things that myself and many others believe in. This is why most pictures are in open spaces where we meet, share our views and ask ourselves where we come from and where we are going.

Photography allows us to show our situation as it is.

Photography and situation

*Images by Martín Amande for Prison to Prison.

Photography and situation

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The [architecture] coming insurrection* dpr- barcelona is an architectural research practice based in Barcelona, dealing with three main lines: publishing, criticism and curating. Their work explore how architecture as discipline reacts in the intersection with politics, technology, economy and social issues. Their publications, both digital and printed, transcend the boundaries of conventional publications, exploring the limits between printed matters and new media. Their [net]work is a real hub linking several publications and actors on architecture and theory.

Ethel Baraona Pohl: Critic, writer and curator [but she prefers Professional Amateur].

César Reyes Nájera: PhD on Bio-climatic construction systems and materials.

“Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance. Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something constituted over there.…

An insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire — a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythms of their own vibrations, always taking on more density.”

— The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection.

The world has changed and so do the role of the architect. We’re facing new ways of thinking, of trading, of acting. On this arena of speculation, the first step when moving into this new scenario should be to realize that in the end, the crisis is just a way of governing and it’s up to us to legitimate it or not.

Under the existing dominant society, which produces the miserable pseudo-games of non-participation, a true civic and urban activity is necessarily. The re-emergence of Huizinga and Situationist’s homo ludens seems almost a need again, to discover new ways of interact with the city. The feeling that the [architecture] coming insurrection is close, can be smelled in the air, it can be perceived from autonomous organisation of the prosumers of the new culture, aside from existing political and ideological establishments, as we all together

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*The Coming Insurrection is a French political tract about the “imminent collapse of capitalist culture”, written by The Invisible Committee, and first published in 2007 by French company La Fabrique

The [architecture] coming insurrection

“can dispute institutions’ capacity to organise anything other than the management of that which already exists”01 and because such institutions cannot prevent what they are not able to imagine yet.

The riposte of the revolutionary citizens to these old conditions must be a new type of action. Architects and related disciplines have a social, economic and political responsibility and is in our hands to give formal proposals as answers to the current situation. According to the political analyst Francis Fukuyama02, the satisfaction of certain human beings depend on recognition that is inherently unequal, and this inequality is why our implication becomes a need. How can we avoid the historical pessimism mentioned by Fukuyama and change our paradigms? Manfredo Tafuri pointed on his book “Architecture and utopia: design and capitalist development”03 “Architecture now undertook the task of rendering its work “political.” As a political agent the architect had to assume the task of continual invention of advanced solutions, at the most generally applicable level. In the acceptance of this task, the architect’s role as idealist became prominent.” We can see that this need for political implication is nothing new; it’s now time to demystify complex ideologies and work from the basis of our practice. The city is here to stay, to grow, to de-grow, to change and transform; and the role of the architect needs to adapt itself to these transformations.

There are so many lessons that we can learn from the convulsed, immediate past that had left cities full of the undeniable presence of the so-called “in between spaces” [physical and non-physical], where there is another field of action for architecture, so we can try to address real challenges as a response to the current economic and geopolitical relationships. In times when the word “drone” is taking more importance than the word “dream”, it’s easy to understand that we need to act, and to act now. Not from our wonderful and shiny studios, but to go back to the street, to talk with people in a daily basis, to reinforce the presence of concepts such as “prosociality”, “urban empathy” and “relational”. We’re facing one of the most wonderful times in years, because there is an opportunity to take action. It’s time to think how we should be organizing to confront what already exists while working for the world to come. The close and direct relationship with other agents is more important than ever, because architects are just one more piece of a bigger puzzle called society. According to Keller Easterling on her essay “Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft”04: “Today urban space has become a mobile, monetized technology, and some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in the spatial information of infrastructure, architecture and urbanism.” If Easterling is describing the real “now”, we can see the importance of the role of the architect to address real changes in the urban environment.

But how to do that? How to address a real change? There are new tools that we can use, the growing presence of digital media as communication tool, new forms of economics and trade, such as crowdfunding, social money and micropayments, based on the confidence and support of the network; are here to stay. Bottom-up urban strategies can be a real catalyst for change in our cities; the use of empty spaces are setting the stage for a new commons where urban conflicts can be solved by understanding the dynamics of each community. In cities as Madrid or Barcelona, which are being increasingly privatized, we have witnessed powerful

01 Situationist Manifesto. Internationale Situationniste#4. 1960. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/manifesto. html [visited on January 2013] 02 Fukuyama, Francis. The end of history and the last man. Free Press, 1989.

03 Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. MIT Press, 1979.

04 Keller Easterling,“Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft” http://places.designobserver.com/feature/zone-the-spatial-softwares-of-extrastatecraft/34528/ [visited on June 2011]

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citizen movements, and grassroots groups, including Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) and the housing groups from 15M assemblies, who are working to stop and transform the foreclosure processes, being capable of stopping housing evictions and even forcing legal framework changes.

Is this the age of co-op? The age of Adhocracy? Maybe is the age of conviviality. As pointed by Ivan Illich05, “tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user.” Thus, convivial tools should be accessible, flexible, and non-coercive and we all should have access to them. While the global economy seems to be collapsing, time has come to recover conviviality as a leitmotif of our work. To transform dissatisfaction into serious proposals to start taking back the city for the citizens, to remove the distinction of public and private in the urban environment, we must learn to “feel” the city again.

It must be very presumptuous trying to give answers or recipes to avoid this symptomatic crisis and to radically change the situation only from the conventional architectural practice. We must be humble enough to open our senses and start thinking about the city in new ways, beyond our formal-architecture-knowledge in a dérive, through a playful and constructive behavior, that can drive us to work for this necessary insurrection.

Text courtesy of the authors. First published in ‘The Last Issue’, Conditions, 2014.

05 Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. Harper & Row, 1973.

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The [architecture] coming insurrection

(Text by Regina José Galindo)

America’s Family Prison

I rent a cell used in exhibitions within the private prison industry in the United States. Taking as a model the family cells of T. Don Hutto Correctional Center (Texas), I adapt it and dwell in it together with my baby and my husband for 24 hours.

When leaving, the door is left open and the cell is shown as an art object.

Regina José Galindo is a visual artist specialized in performance art. Her work explores the universal ethical implications of social injustices.

by Regina José Galindo

America’s family prison * Images courtesy of the artist.

Photos by Todd Johnson and David Perez.

America’s Family Prison, 2008.

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Architecture as a political instrument Andrés Jaque and Enrique Walker in conversation

Andrés Jaque is the founder of the Office for Political Innovation. He is Advanced Design Professor at Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation GSAPP Columbia University and Visiting Professor at Princeton University SoA. He has been Tessenow Stipendiat 1998 by the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung FVS, in Hamburg, and visiting professor in a number of international universities. He has lectured extensively throughout the world including Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, MIT (Boston), Instituto Politecnico di Milano, Centre International pour la Ville de Paris, Centre pour l’Architecture et le Paysage (Brussels), Sociedad Central (Buenos Aires), Berlage Institut (Rotterdam) or Museo Nacional (Bogotá).

Enrique Walker is an architect. He is Associate Professor at Columbia GSAPP, where he also directs the Master of Science program in Advanced Architectural Design.

Andrés Jaque: As you know, I’ve been studying for a while now Rafael Viñoly Architects’ design for the 432 Park Avenue building, where Deborah Berke Partners and dbox have also played an important role. I am interested in this project because it challenges architectural intelligence in a fundamental question: its political dimension. For many architects, it is an excellent

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design that unfortunately serves despicable political purposes – as an instrument and a record of growing social inequality in places like New York. For them, 432 Park Avenue shows that there exists a division between the quality of form, of material configuration and even of performance in architecture, and the ideologies that a project finally serves. In other words, the political participation of buildings is foreign to their design.

But for me, that division often does not exist, and this project allows to detect that there are specific ways of doing politics instigated by architecture’s formal, material and performative design. The participation of 432 Park Avenue in the construction of inequality is partly embedded in its design.

An example could be the way the building relates to the New York City sky. Something that begins with the way it is portrayed in the project’s renders. It is a sky of an intense, very transparent blue, which allows for distant views. The building’s developer, Harry Marklow, offers privileged access to this sky as one of the apartments’ major selling arguments. Before the building was completed, prospective buyers even had the possibility of seeing the exact views of each apartment, captured by drones from the plot itself. Extraordinarily distant views that Marklow named “helicopter views,” devising a new architectural feature associated with a new type of social structure.

Architecture as a political instrument

This may seem like a commercial argument that does not affect either the project or the building – but it is not. This sky and its architectural mobilization is the result of a set of very precise design decisions. At the scale of the building, the 4 x 4 square meter windows become fundamental for the design, allowing – from the point of view of a person standing on the upper-floor apartments – to balance the number of built elements perceived with a larger patch of sky. The absence of partitions inside the openings offers views without interference. But above all, the use of a very expensive glass – Lite Glass, manufactured in Austria by Eckelt – has the property of intensifying blue tones. Considering that in the apartments there are no openable windows, therefore no way to observe the sky without the blueish Lite Glass filter, the effect will be perceived as ‘authentic,’ or rather as unmediated from their inside.

This is just a part of New York’s sky design. Over the last two decades, the city has invested large sums in water purification plants, the eradication of many of its industrial activities or the increase of its green areas. 432 Park Avenue is to be understood as a collaboration with those architectural projects, which seem to mutually follow the mission that Michael Bloomberg clarified in 2013 with these words: “If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend (…).” The sky’s pollution has not disappeared; it has simply been relocated to places like Susquehanna Valley in Pennsylvania, where increased toxicity from waste treatment and hydraulic gas extraction has reduced real estate value. The reduced cost of property and the granting of tax exemptions encouraging the settlement of people with limited resources are also part of the regional design from which 432 Park Avenue takes part. The project to increase inequality on the United States East Coast – billionaires on an environmentally purified coast, low-income people in a hinterland that assumes the environmental costs of coastal consumption – is a design project, made possible only through formal, material and performative adjustments operating coordinately at different scales. When looking at each of these design episodes in isolation, it is not easy to see how they participate in these policies. But once understood how they cooperate with each other, it is no longer possible to continue understanding the design decisions that shape them as independent from their political effects.

The cosmo project at MoMA ps1, which we have also called ‘Give me a pipe and I will change the world – or at least some of it’ is a design answering to those projects that promote inequality. It was our winning proposal for the 2016 Young Architects Program (yap) that MoMA convenes annually in New York, and that reaches a great audience through media and social

networks. For us, this was the main asset of the competition. As a commission, it does not involve great programmatic requirements, but the real opportunity is that it successfully gathers an audience willing to experience ‘something’ in a critical way. Our idea was to be able to reply to these segregation projects. We were looking for an access point to the process, a context where design could develop political agency. This access point had to necessarily be a difference generated by design. The social and environmental purification of New York City depends to a large extent on the fact that the entire purification process remains hidden and ‘blackboxed’ (incomprehensible to civil society, able to get the results but unable to decrypt them and thus take a position on the intermediate steps and how the processes develop). This blackboxing makes the city’s purification and greening to be experienced by civil society as an indisputable evolution, and not as an intentional design. We set out to design an element that would provide an alternative to this purification, abolishing the illusion that toxicity disappears. That showed the possibility of proposing urban models opposed to the unequal distribution of daily life environmental costs, which fostered a critical reading and understanding of the processes materially regulating our societies. We set out to do so by means of an attractive device that could be joyfully inhabited, and that – by means of the sensorial experience it allowed – gave ps1 visitors and their distant audiences the opportunity to access criticism. cosmo operated as a vertical garden, a set of ecosystems through which polluted water from the sewage system circulated. After interacting for a couple of weeks with these ecosystems, this water was turned into drinking water. The process began in eight transparent water tanks containing fragments of great biodiversity wetlands, which we grew aided by Brooklyn Botanic Garden experts. In them, water underwent a process of decantation and metabolization, by which a large number of microorganisms decomposed the molecules in suspension. A few days later, two pumps pushed the water into a transparent coil that exposed it to ultraviolet solar rays, eliminating bacteria potentially dangerous to humans. From here, water passed into bags containing different types of algae that, as part of their metabolism, extracted the phosphates and nitrates dissolved in the water. Finally, the water fell into a cascade that increased the levels of diluted oxygen, so that when water returned to the base tanks, the effect of the wetlands biological agents was accelerated.

The purpose of the project was that cosmo made such process comprehensible, while at the same time offering shade and favorable weather conditions which, in a courtyard as arid and as uncomfortable as

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that of ps1, could attract people to join a conversation on water, its toxicity and the technologies behind its transformation.

We built it as an assembly of components from agricultural plantations irrigation systems (pivot type), with the idea that it could be dismantled to travel and be reinstalled in other places. But it also traveled through social networks. We developed an app that allowed following the water transformation from mobile phones.

Enrique Walker: I was very interested in talking about cosmo, since your project allowed me to question or reconsider two opinions. The first has to do with a conversation we have had for a long time on how architecture operates politically (or how the architect operates politically from his/her practice). My position, nourished indirectly by the late 1960s debate, implies both confidence and skepticism: confidence in political projects within and through architecture; skepticism about the building as an instrument to operate with. A building, usually expensive and slow in its conception and execution, can hardly articulate a world alternative to the one underlying its commission. However, it can operate critically and raise questions. How it does it has been the central issue of our conversation. The second opinion is related to the competition, and – for the winner – the commission of the yap in New York. In a scene where opportunities for emerging architects are quite limited, it has become an accelerator, a central piece in consolidating a practice, but generally at the expense of the project itself (and, as it is an early project, to postpone any kind of argument or position). The conflict between its significant role and limited architectural potential, partially due to its constraints – a simple program, a site with few qualities, a tight budget – has led many to propose more architecture than what the commission seems to require: at best a pavilion, at worst, a sort of spatial or building exercise. I considered, before knowing your project, that it was not possible to use such restrictions in favor. cosmo is an artifact or device that, in addition to strictly adhering to the commission, takes advantage precisely of its condition of visibility as a political tool.

AJ: There was no functional requirement behind MoMA’s commission, neither a vision; what did exist was the need for MoMA to attract public attention. What was important to us was what to do with that attention. At one of the meetings, Klaus Biesenbach, ps1 director, told me: “What I want is something that people can post on Instagram.” But what was important to me was that this need could be rebuilt by adding other propositions to the commission redefining the ps1’s relationship with its audience. cosmo can be understood as an object of collective calculation that provides a probation experience.

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EW: Indeed, through precise design operations – programmatic, material, aesthetic ones – the object makes visible and comprehensible a process to a certain extent hidden, and, once made public, it becomes the subject of debate: the political space par excellence.

AJ: Exactly. The question we asked ourselves was what could the entry point of architecture into an issue such as inequality be – a reality that is built through the collaboration of numerous architectures (such as 432 Park Avenue or the territorial segregation of toxicity and low real estate value), but where architectural action does not have enough power to directly reverse these architectures. That is, in our case, it was not in our power – for example – to replace 432 Park Avenue with a building that would empower New York’s social diversity.

The opportunity for intervention is not given; it needs to be enabled. It is somehow a way of stating that architectural practices are not always neutral transmitters of the ethical projects previously defined by their promoters. Design always operates politically by itself. In some cases, aligned with its promoters’ ideas, in others, introducing autonomous agendas. I believe that, just as doctors or judges organize themselves as a discipline by claiming their capacity for political mediation, many architectural traditions practice architecture as a project that introduces autonomous political notions.

But these political forms are not those of declaration, of the spoken word or the vote. I believe that in those moments when architecture is seen as a mere transmitter of messages previously elaborated somewhere else, the agency of architectural practices is again denied.

Design’s agency comes from the use of measurements, of material options, from the way it spatially distributes the agents of those processes in which architecture partakes, the way it filters what is perceptible and what is not; ultimately, of a specific type of politics that only occurs when the architectural devices come into play.

Here, the thing about water is that it is already ‘architecturized.’ The experience we have of water is mediated by architecture: by pipes, by the design of bathrooms, by the way water infrastructures are territorially distributed, etc. If architecture had a say in that reality, introducing an architecture that instead of rendering invisible such contribution restored it as something calculable, available for critical reception, this would be a good way of deploying architecture’s agency and, by doing so, showing its ability to make a difference in an already existing political conversation.

EW: As I mentioned earlier, skepticism grew among architects in the late 1960s regarding the ability of architecture to operate politically, particularly among those most active in political terms, those who dealt with the conflict

Architecture as a political instrument

between architectural practice and political position. On the one hand, much of the first half of the twentieth-century manifestoes had not been materialized, to such an extent that the manifesto itself fell into disuse later. On the other hand, the critical revision of modern legacy led to discrediting some of the avant-gardes central instruments, such as programming (the definition of new behaviors and, by extension, new social structures) and signification (the representation of new contents). The project of transforming the world was not questioned, but the instruments from which architecture offered to do so were. Moreover, architecture was considered too dependent on power to subvert it, which led many architects, as concerned with politics as with architecture, to abandon the discipline or to operate through paper practices (for example, counter design).

Approximately since the Great Recession (2008 crisis), the debate on architecture and politics has once again taken the center stage. The term politics has been raised in architecture but, curiously enough, little attention has been paid to the instruments through which architecture operates politically. The return to the architecture and politics debate has not meant a review of the strategies adopted.

AJ: I share your view that this is a very important issue.

And also that it is necessary to understand how a project like cosmo responds to these two crises that you explain.

Instead of conveying meanings, cosmo builds differently the infrastructures in which meaning is produced. That is, it does not introduce a specific opinion on water in New York City, but rather provides the elements for this critical work to expand its audience and for that audience to have more elements for judgment. In doing so, the project does not intervene by modifying or defining behaviors according to previously outlined patterns; rather, it understands that its mission is to contribute to rearticulate social structures, to propose alternative social networks, allowing, for instance, to redistribute the access to knowledge while creating, therefore, an alternative network of those discussing water. For us, it was very important that the debate cosmo promoted was recorded and made transparent by means of the set of technologies that cosmo gathered. On the online spaces that were part of the project, we circulated the conversations and the reactions that the project caused. But for me, it is even more important what happened with the object itself, which was the result of a social assembly – as many of the ecosystems components had been developed by specialized entities such as the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the digital interfaces development team at nyu or groups of environmental activists. During the dismantling of cosmo, some of the networks of people and institutions that had discussed water through cosmo adopted portions of its gardens. By taking over and installing these fragments in their everyday surroundings,

the project itself was expanded and allowed the possibility of keeping the discussion open, becoming a living archive of the cumulus of debates. We could empower a composition [design] policy where design practices play an important role. Assemblage, inter-scalar connections – that is, the way in which, for instance, something small is related to something that occurs on a territorial scale – are architectural skills.

EW: In my opinion, your project defines precise political instruments. The project draws the attention from the object to the debate that the object itself promotes. In short, it is a device to prompt a conversation.

AJ: Right. Framing the focus of the project was critical.

Also, that it started by assessing what could be expected from its performance. This question is important, as I believe that architecture must always acknowledge that it acts in collaboration with and as a reaction to other entities and projects. The same way that 432 Park Avenue complements its action with that of the centralized treatment plants and the fiscal policies that incentivized low-income people to move to Susquehanna, cosmo must rely on the fact that its action will be limited, but that it will definitely form an association with other forces and with the actions of other entities.

EW: I would be interested to know how much of the history of the Young Architects Program competition did you consider as an additional component of the commission. You are perhaps the first to use the project’s widespread diffusion as a central tool of its argument.

AJ: Yes. As the yap ps1 annual competition gets wide media coverage, cosmo would inevitably be part of architects and designers’ conversations. Normally, it is a conversation on styles or trends that allows a young architect’s studio to gain visibility as the standard-bearer for certain themes and styles. Being a small project, many offices in the past needed to expand the intervention and its ambitions so that it could promote all of their abilities. But for us, the interest was not so much in using this debate as an opportunity to show our office, but rather to take part in a more important discussion affecting our society as a whole. We were not interested, nor would it have been possible, to replace this controversy, as it already exists through a single voice: ours.

The project was limited to contribute in reconstructing the terms of the conversation. cosmo’s form was specially designed to avoid any confusion on its ineffectiveness to solve a water purification problem. It was very clear that the installation was not plugged to any water system. It was a critical object whose aim was nothing more than to propose alternative

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ways of thinking about toxicity and its territorial distribution. It was not a short cut announcing ‘now we can purify the water, and the toxicity problem is over.’ cosmo did not solve any problem.

EW: Its aim is not to solve a problem or to offer an alternative, but to prompt the conversation that could eventually lead to alternatives.

AJ: Neither the ps1 project nor probably any architectural project could make a problem disappear or give a definitive solution to any of the issues facing our societies. But that does not mean that they cannot establish alliances that end up substantially modifying the way these issues develop on a daily basis, or that they can offer alternative possibilities. I think in the sixties there was a great reliance on absolute ideas and on the omnipotence of the project to promote new realities, without recognizing the social complexity that slows down and problematizes any change process. It was thought that a project could radically change the world by itself. The frustration with the inability of architecture to offer immediacy and totalitarianism is to me a sign of innocence and ignorance; the evidence is that many architects find it difficult to give up that illusion of architecture’s absolute power. My interest in studying cases like that of 432 Park Avenue comes from the need to understand that any political process is never the outcome of an isolated action, but of the alliance and collaboration between several design actions. This does not mean that each of these actions does not have a political effect, but rather that this effect is not absolute, it is put into play in a negotiation and a collaboration with other entities’ political effects. The same happens with the processes of resistance, subversion or opposition: they arise from the collaboration between a number of actions, all of limited scope. cosmo aims to create a space that stimulates a different way of discussing water. Its effectiveness does not come from installing an alternative itself, but from connecting and contributing so as to empower a fabric of alternatives.

EW: Architecture cannot change the world but can contribute to its change through a critique of the present world. Situationist maps are an excellent example.

They keep pieces of the city to suggest an underlying reality in the existing one. As we mentioned, the Great Recession of 2008 reactivated the debate on architecture and politics – virtually frozen since the end of the sixties – and the architects themselves, who since then went from wanting to transform the world to accept that they could only surf the waves (and until recently, I’m afraid, to think of transforming the world by surfing the wave). Your work has played a predominant role in this recovery. I would like to ask you how do you think this

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disciplinary debate will take place, particularly in the face of current political urgencies, when open societies and their democratic institutions – which until short before Brexit’s referendum and Trump’s election, the Anglo-Saxon and European world took for granted – are under enormous pressure. This debate may intensify, or, on the contrary, political urgency may once again expose architecture’s limitations, and be diluted.

AJ: Both issues are related. I believe that the impossibility of architecture’s reversibility – its inability to easily change from being a symptom or diagram of such constructions to become an agent of change – forces architecture to understand societies as complex ecosystems, which do not respond to the predictability metaphors of machines and that can only be modified gradually by accumulation of successive trials. Lefebvre’s ideas have been key for understanding the relations between power and architecture, but they also tend to present power as a unified force. I believe that in our societies there are multiple overlapping ideological structures. There is no single globalization, no single economic power. I believe that architecture has a great capacity to contribute to reinforcing alternative social tissues, redirecting focus, redistributing predominance and making space for the marginal.

Brexit and Trump offer a new relevance for architecture, especially in its ability to bring objectification.

It has been important to me to witness that many of Trump’s projects have been confronted by architectural arguments. The voice of architectural design has taken news networks to show, for example, that the geography of the border makes building the wall impossible in many points. Or that its effectiveness as a control device would be poorer than that of many technologies already in use. Architecture has provided a space for argumentation and objectification in a discussion set in the post-truth era. I believe that architecture is a tool to collectively manage objectification processes. It is a practice focused on supporting those tissues where evidence is collectively discussed. From this perspective, the work by architects such as Cedric Price or even the project linking the Eameses designs with its films and media installations can be better understood.

Trump’s victory is the result of a large cumulus of design operations, many of which have gone unnoticed. I believe that as architects nowadays we must renew our commitment to respond to this engineering of accumulation with a permanent practice of reconstruction, reinvention, and resistance. In both Trump and Brexit’s case, I believe that this also requires a commitment to the recovery of parts of the past that have been invisibilized: welfare state’s capacity to generate inclusion and prosperity in the European post-war period; the social, cultural

Architecture as a political instrument

and economic wealth that migration brought to Europe or the United States tradition of solidarity and its role in the economic recovery after the Great Depression...

I think that architectural practices must now be based on the architect’s public commitment. This should also serve to explore new formats for the development of architectural projects. Architectural practices, as have existed up to now, have depended on getting commissions.

This has often encouraged design thinking to end up becoming a business tool calibrated to get commissions (and not abandoning any possibility of getting them). From this point of view, a re-foundation of the architectural practice becomes urgent, one where public commitment becomes the basis for design activities. I also believe that this will empower smaller, fragmented projects, amplified in time and operating by trail-and-error accumulation rather than by its radicalism.

EW: A significant role architecture can assume, as a cultural practice, is the defense of culture itself, also under pressure, especially from within architecture. The discipline’s depoliticization over the last decades has gone hand in hand with an attack on intellectual practice and the exaltation of simple solutions to complex problems.

AJ: In a recent conversation on capitalism, someone said, ‘There’s nothing we can do outside capitalism’, and Silvia Federici replied, ‘No, that’s not true. There are many things that happen outside capitalism. There are people, for example, who organize their daily economy with a certain degree of autonomy from the market dynamics; there are families or groups of coexistence that escape consumerism; there are groups that have created ad hoc communities that have been working for decades on the fringes of monetization.’ I believe that generating frameworks where things happen in a different way has already a value in itself, a testimony or experience that can serve as reference. Someone may say, ‘No, water treatment infrastructures do not necessarily have to be protected and hidden; there are cases where it has been done otherwise.’ Architecture has a great capacity to create alternative evidences.

AJ: For me, aesthetics is not an opportunity for personal expression or the development of a language. It has a specific mission or role: here, a political function. This is also true of projects with other political missions. For example, Viñoly’s project also uses aesthetics to pursue political objectives; what happens is that these objectives are opposed to those cosmo intended to activate. Precision behind selecting a certain glass is also an aesthetic decision in the search for very concrete political effects: perceiving as natural something that has been constructed. In cosmo aesthetics is a tool to make perceptible aspects of reality that otherwise would go unnoticed. For example, the use of colors allows reading the sequence of ecosystems, since each one of them is framed in a different color; or the transparency of pipes, which does not look for a stylistic effect but responds instead to the need for the evolution of the color of water to be readable.

Aesthetics is an instrument to give voice to processes that otherwise would not be taken into account.

Text courtesy of the authors. First published in JAQUE, Andrés; WALKER, Enrique. “La arquitectura como instrumento político: Andrés Jaque y Enrique Walker en conversación”. ARQ 96 “Instrumentos” (Agosto, 2017):16-31.

EW: Finally, I would like you to refer to cosmo’s aesthetic dimension. Your project prompts a conversation through a series of precise design operations. Curiously, the debate on architecture and aesthetics has been postponed for even longer than that of architecture and politics.

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Critical Memes

These images are anonymous and were taken by Prison to Prison from the Internet.

This ‘harvest’ of critical images about prisons brings together a selection of anonymous memes taken from Google Images under the term “prison memes”.

Nowadays, we can all make memes.

We may edit images already edited by others, upload them to the web quickly, let others see and re-edit them, and so on.

Memes may be today’s version of the paintings of the Cave of Altamira; a faithful record of the mood of an ordinary person.

Anonymous, ephemeral, explosive and collectively built, they highlight the obsessions, fears and desires of our digital society.

from the Internet

Critical Memes

img 01

img 02

img 06

img 04

img 05

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img 03

*All the images are taken from Google Images.

img 06 If I take my own picture in jail.

img 05 Trump University.

img 04 When are you next free?

img 03 What’s the difference between a school and a prison?

img 02 Millennials be like don’t call it ‘prison’, call it ‘time out’.

img 01 Sometimes it’s only the fear of prison food that stops me.

The long laugh of all these years* Notes on the Uruguayan prison and the everlasting bet to rehabilitate in new establishments.

01 The slogan was created by Juan Carlos Gómez Folle in 1934, first director of the Penitentiary Institutes of Uruguay, who planned the building of an “Educational Working Colony”, which became later the “Penal de Libertad”.

02 Furthermore, it could be said that even before. In the 18th century, when Uruguay was the Banda Oriental and was governed by Spain, there were two prisons in Montevideo for which there were already controversies over its management: the Public Prison, located in the Cabildo building and managed by the police, and the one in Real Ciudadela de la Plaza, which was managed by the military. None had “adequate” conditions for confinement, and although back then the situation was already worrying (so much so that the first Uruguayan Constitution (1830) in article 138 reads: “in no case will jails be allowed to mortify but only to ensure the defendant “), it was not until 1853 that the first prison parliamentary initiative was submitted to build a” comfortable and safe “public prison.

* Title of a story

by Rodolfo Fogwill.

Angelina de los Santos is Uruguayan, she is 27 years old and she is one of those journalists who does nothing more (or less) than lift up stones to listen if there is noise below.

In June 1945 some Uruguayans sighed, full of illusions, with the start-up of the Corrective School for Social Misfits. The prison, expected to put back on track those who “went astray”, was installed in one of the pavilions of what was intended to be a large complex, that would also have an Educational Working Colony. Men would be rehabilitated by cultivating the land, in Libertad, a town 50 kilometers far from Montevideo. Although only some of the facilities were inaugurated, the idea of a “countryside healing effect” triggered such an enthusiasm that the Minister of Interior at that time, Juan Carbajal Victorica, ordered the following iron made inscription: “Here the man is reformed by the land and the land by man”01; an unmistakable symbol of the prison’s purpose. This was the building’s frontispiece until 1972. Afterwards, during the dictatorship, the prison became the Military Reclusion Establishment N°1 with a welcome sign “We are here to obey”. Thirteen years later, during the transition towards the democratic regime, the sign was removed and the prison became the so-called “Penal de Libertad” (a paradox, since Libertad means Freedom).

As the Uruguayan historian Daniel Fessler remarks, the concept of a prison has changed since the 19 th century02, when the debate on the institutionalized confinement of those who commit crimes began: it is no longer required “to frighten people by making them suffer, but to reform the offender; from an instrument of torture and public revenge, to an institution of moral reform03”. Perhaps one might think that the successive goals of imprisonment were so evident that the iron slogans were only reminders to someone unaware.

However, even today it seems that there is no alignment between the purpose sought with confinement and the general results obtained with the “rehabilitation” programs (recidivism, overcrowding, poor prison conditions). Prison´s inefficiency is a concern for the authorities who, again and again, claim that they have no choice, then, but to keep on building more prisons. They assure that the new facilities and services will allow the State to comply with one of its most difficult constitutional mandates04: not to “mortify” the inmate but to “reeducate” him.

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03 Fessler, D. (2012). Criminal law and punishment in Uruguay (1878-1907).

Montevideo, Uruguay: Department of Communications, Communication Unit of the University of the Republic, pag. 19 04 Article 26 of the Constitution of the Oriental Republic of Uruguay states: “The death penalty shall not be applied to anyone. In no case will prisons be allowed to mortify, but only to ensure the defendant and convicts, pursuing their reeducation, aptitude for work and crime prophylaxis.“ 05 Landeira, R & Scapusio, B. (1997).

Criminal System, review and alternatives. Montevideo, Uruguay: Carlos Álvarez, page 134.

06 The first is the UIPPL N ° 4, former Santiago Vázquez - Comcar Prison Complex, with a capacity for 3,600 people, approximately.

The first prison that was built to meet these needs was “Miguelete”. As early as 1889 it was considered to be the future penitentiary “model” for Uruguay and Latin America . The large courtyards, the cells designed according to the sanitary guidelines of that period, the learning system of trades and crafts, would reform the “disorganized” subject and turn him into a valuable person. By 1909, humidity had already done a lot of damage, training sessions had been discontinued, and the number of people in prison had almost doubled: from 800 to 1,300, occupying nine inmates each cell05.

Today Uruguay has 29 prisons for adults. Only one of these was designed within the framework of the Public-Private Participation Law: Unit No. 1, popularly known as “the new prison of Punta de Rieles”, due to its location.

It is the second largest prison in the country06, designed to imprison 1,960 men. The private sector will have an entirely new role in Uruguay. According to the authorities, the bidding company is responsible to provide maintenance, cleaning, food, laundry and sale of groceries, in addition to projection, construction and equipment. In this way the government will be able to concentrate its efforts in custody, monitoring and social reintegration policies, lowering recurrence levels07.

Given these circumstances, one might ask whether the introduction of the private sector in prison management is a reflection of a policy that, without taking into account one’s experience, brings together different models of rehabilitation under the same system or, on the contrary, will imply adopting a new unique management paradigm. It will also be necessary to see what kind of useful citizen this hybrid intends to promote.

And with what new slogan they will come up with.

07 De los Santos, A. (La Diaria). The prison that is being built with the private sector will “rehabilitate”, because there will be “given the conditions of confinement and services.” March 21, 2018, from La Diaria Website: https:// ladiaria.com.uy/articulo/2016/12/ la-carcel-que-se-esta-construyendocon-privados-rehabilitara-porqueestaran-dadas-las-condiciones-dereclusion-y-servicios/

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The long laugh of all these years

An oficial story

These images were taken from videos of the YouTube account of the Uruguayan Ministry of Interior. They were uploaded to the web between June 2014 and February 2018 and show a positive view of the construction process of prison Unit No.1 of Punta de Rieles.

The first one shows –through rendered images and 3D schemes of all the buildings, and with a sweet female voice similar to those that describe telesales products– how this future ‘new generation penitentiary centre, according to the most demanding international standards in terms of prison management and treatment,’ will be. The last one shows us the police operation during the entry of the first handcuffed prisoners.

As part of a new way of communication and, why not, marketing strategy of the Ministry –which also shows videos of thieves being captured and weekly

by Prison to Prison

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* These images were taken by Prison to Prison from YouTube account ‘MInterior Uruguay’.

news reports– the videos are brief, friendly and positive. Its edition combines drone shots, authority visits, interviews with managers and close-ups of the construction process.

In the videos, architecture is the main subject. Phase after phase, the progress percentages of the works are presented with detailed descriptions of what has been done and what remains to be done. The ‘new construction system prefabricated in concrete, never before used in our country’, fast and efficient, seems to be the star of the story. An optimistic official version ofprogress, technique and architecture.

An oficial story

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* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘Unidad Nº 1 de Montevideo- la primera ‘PPP’ del país’, 11 June 2014.

img 04 “Active and passive security systems guarantee, in each area as well as in the security border, the adequate custody of the persons deprived of liberty and the necessary security of those who visit and work in the Unit”.

*Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘Unidad Nº 1 de Montevideo- la primera ‘PPP’ del país’, 11 June 2014.

img 03 “The unit is perfectly structured to differentiate and organize all access, pedestrian and vehicular circulations, guaranteeing the different levels of security”.

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘Unidad Nº 1 de Montevideo- la primera ‘PPP’ del país’, 11 June 2014.

img 02 “It is organized as a small, self-sufficient urban complex with all the spaces and equipment necessary for the re-education and re-socialization of the inmates and for the staff of the National Prison Rehabilitation Institute to develop their work in the best conditions”.

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘Unidad Nº 1 de Montevideo- la primera ‘PPP’ del país’, 11 June 2014.

img 01 “The Prison Unit No.1 of Montevideo, is a state-of-the-art penitentiary center in accordance with the most demanding international standards regarding prison management and treatment”.

*Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘Manos a la Obra’, 3 December 2015.

img 07 “Construction began on Unit No.1 of Punta de Rieles, a prison complex for 2000 inmates. This is the first project carried out under the public-private participation regime. In an area of 55,000 square meters, 25 buildings with unique characteristics will be built”.

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘Unidad Nº 1 de Montevideo- la primera ‘PPP’ del país’, 11 June 2014.

img 06 “The Unit, with its buildings of two or three story and with the appropriate chromatic treatment, is perfectly integrated into the environment, offering the city a modern image, totally remote from the concept of a traditional prison”.

*Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘Unidad Nº 1 de Montevideo- la primera ‘PPP’ del país’, 11 June 2014.

img 05 “The Unit has three levels of prison classification of medium and low security, with a total space for 1860 inmates and 100 inmates in the center of admission”.

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* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘PPPavance de obra’, 13 May 2016.

img 10 “Today, an advance of the work of the Penitentiary Unit No.1 of Punta de Rieles was presented, which is now in the 10th month of construction, which means a 20% of the whole Project”.

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘Avance de la construcción de la Unidad Nº 1 Punta de Rieles’, 10 March 2016.

img 09 “Week by week the growth of the work is very noticeable. The constructive system foresees to install molds here, which are now in full installation, which will allow each module of cells to be built in a serial way “.

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘Manos a la Obra’, 3 December 2015.

img 08 “The approach that has been given to the work, basically, is an industrialization approach.

In other words, in contrast to the artisanal, what has been tried to do is to make it the most industrial as possible. The main concept is to overlap tasks, for example, while the floor movement was being made, pillars were already being manufactured; while pillars are being assembled plates and cells will be being manufactured. Then the work times are shortened”.

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘Avance de obra Unidad de reclusión Nº 1’, 1 December 2016.

img 15 “For the month of December, it is foreseen the construction of the last cells building”.

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘Avance de obra Unidad de reclusión Nº 1’, 1 December 2016.

img 14 “The technology in place, never used before in our country, allows building a 12-cell module per day”.

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘Avance de obra Unidad de reclusión Nº 1’, 1 December 2016.

img 13 “The technology in place, never used before in our country, allows building a 12-cell module per day”.

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘Avance de obra Unidad de reclusión Nº 1’, 1 December 2016.

img 12 “The technology in place, never used before in our country, allows building a 12-cell module per day”.

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘PPP- avance de obra’, 13 May 2016.

img 11 “The technical details of this construction characterize the work as a fast and novel system. Thanks to this modality, the assembly of a cell module is achieved in approximately 20 minutes. Each module has 4 cells, which will accommodate 3 prisoners in each”.

An oficial story

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* Image and comment taken from YouTube videov: ‘PPP etapa final’, 31 Julio 2017.

img 20 “Authorities of the Ministry of the Interior visited the Unit N°1 of Punta de Rieles, where they were informed about the progress of the work that reaches 90% of construction”

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘PPP etapa final’, 31 July 2017.

img 19 “So far, 97% of the purchases of the entire project have been completed, and the end of the construction is scheduled for the month of October”.

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘PPP etapa final’, 31 July 2017.

img 18 “The process is now on the 23th month of construction, and 773,981,531 ‘indexed units’ have been invested (approximately 106 million dollars)”.

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘75 % Unidad Nº 1 Punta de Rieles PPP’, 21 March 2017.

img 17 “In the work, which began on July 30, 2015, 751 people are working. Since then, no serious accidents have been reported, and an internal audit visit was conducted with satisfactory results”.

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘Avance de obra Unidad de reclusión Nº 1’, 1 December 2016.

img 16 “Authorities of the Ministries of the Interior, Economy and Housing, visited the work of the Unit of Internment No.1, the first public-private participation project in the country”.

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* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘Trasladan internos a la Unidad Nº 1 de Punta de Rieles’, 16 February 2018.

img 23 “The National Rehabilitation Institute is carrying out the transfer of persons deprived of their liberty from Unit N°4 of Santiago Vázquez to the new Unit N°1 of Punta de Rieles”.

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘PPP etapa final’, 31 July 2017.

An oficial story

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘Trasladan internos a la Unidad Nº 1 de Punta de Rieles’, 16 February 2018.

img 25 “For these transfers, the Technical Subdirectorate of the National Rehabilitation Institute selects persons deprived of liberty who will be relocated to the new unit. The process began in October 2017 with the interviews that took place in the Unit No. 4, which was one of the units selected as priority. The recidivism levels were evaluated with this tool, which are combined with the variable ‘risk of conflictivity’”.

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘Trasladan internos a la Unidad Nº 1 de Punta de Rieles’, 16 February 2018.

* Image and comment taken from YouTube video: ‘PPP etapa final’, 31 July 2017.

img 22 “Authorities of the Ministry of the Interior visited the Unit N°1 of Punta de Rieles, where they were informed about the progress of the work that reaches 90% of construction”.

img 24 “A sequence of transfers is planned on different dates to bring contingents of 50 to 100 people to occupy the nearly 2,000 places offered by the new rehabilitation center”.

img 21 “Authorities of the Ministry of the Interior visited the Unit N°1 of Punta de Rieles, where they were informed about the progress of the work that reaches 90% of construction”.

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The first public-private partnership experience in prisons in Uruguay 01 See: The evolution of incarceration rates. Parliamentary Commissioner for the Prison System. Boletín Estadístico del Sistema Penitenciario, No. 2. First semester, 2017, p. 4.

02 IbIdem. p. 6.

02 Section 1 of Act No. 18.667: “The

Dr. Daniel R. Zubillaga Puchot, Attorney-at-law. He graduated from the Law School of the University of the Republic. He is a free-lance Criminal and Family Law Lawyer. He is a G. 1 Researcher in CSIC projects “Dogmática pena y jurisprudencia: la constitución de la práctica” and “Plan estratégico para la instalación del Observatorio de los sistemas judicial y legislativo - Fase B”.

Dr. Rodrigo Rey, Attorney-at-law. He graduated from the Law School of the University of the Republic.

Executive is granted, until December 31, 2010, an extraordinary, one-time authorization to resort to the necessary funding sources for up to $ 292,192,931 (two hundred ninety-two millions one hundred and ninety-two thousand nine hundred and thirty-one Uruguayan pesos), to be used, according to the procedures set forth by Texto Ordenado de Contabilidad y Administración Financiera y Normas Concordantes y Complementarias (TOCAF - Accounting and Financial Administration Rules Compilation Amended Text), exclusively to: 1) Build, install, recycle, renovate, and, in general, perform any building modification in prison buildings and facilities. 2) Pur-

“The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this, the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as “commodities” [...]. The criminal moreover produces the whole of the police and of criminal justice: constables, judges, hangmen, juries, etc”. Apologetic notion of all professions’ productivity. Karl Marx.

“There is no “better” prison; all prisons are degrading”.

Carlos E. Uriarte (Assistant Professor of Criminal Law, Law School, University of the Republic).

chase, lease or loan premises for prisons or correctional facilities. 3) Purchase the necessary equipment for buildings and correctional facilities, so as to comply with the purposes of this act. 4) Pay for the expenses arising from the transfer of inmates, their food, basic needs, hygiene and healthcare”.

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Current situation of Uruguayan prison system The Uruguayan prison system is currently undergoing a deep crisis on account of overpopulation, overcrowding, the high number of prisoners awaiting sentence, recidivism and degrading cases of in-prison violence.

The first public-private partnership experience in prisons in Uruguay

04 See sections 206 to 275; 222; and 226 of Act No. 18.719.

05 According to the Profile Analysis “The best PPP scheme for the Uruguayan scenario would be the DBFOT (Design, Build, Finance, Operate & Transfer) scheme. The private partner would design, build and maintain the facilities, being allowed to adjust the design to the future operation of certain services, and would finance the project, resorting to funding from different available sources (its own capital, bank loans, debt issuance). The private partner would also operate some services during the life of the agreement, which would be of more than 20 years. Upon expiry of this term, the private partner would transfer the facilities to the State.”

National Development Corporation.

Report – Prisoners Project No. 1. Profile Analysis. Project Evaluation Management, 2011, p. 14.

06 Ibidem, p. 14.

07 The report states: “(…) the PPP scheme keeps infrastructure and prison services substantially under public control; by transferring to the private sector the financing, design, building, maintenance and operation of the facilities, the funding problem is partially solved, as public funds are limited and their unavailability would delay the provision of a required service (cost of society waiting time ), and the State is freed from extra charges and overtime risks caused by design problems and unforeseen issues during the construction period, as these risks, together with facilities maintenance risks, would have been transferred to the private partner. For this reason (without prejudice to the fact that this opinion must be validated by the mandatory Value-for-Money analysis) we consider that the Public-Private Partnership would be the most advisable scheme on account of several advantages for the State”.

National Development Corporation: Technical, Financial, Social, Economic and Environmental Feasibility Study of Building a Prison under the Public- Private Partnership Scheme, 2012, p. 4.

08 The report specifically highlights “(…) the possibility of implementing

The statistical report prepared by the office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Prison System reveals that by the end of the first semester of 2017, Uruguayan prisons housed 11,149 individuals, i.e. an incarceration rate of 320 per 100,000 inhabitants, thus placing Uruguay among the first thirty countries in the world01. Specifically, prisons of the metropolitan area concentrate 64.3 % of prison population; Unit No. 3 (Libertad), Unit No. 4 (Santiago Vázquez) and Unit No. 7 (Canelones) house 53.7 % of the country’s prison population02. High recidivism rate -60 %- is particularly evident in these units.

Due to the steady growth in prison population, and extremely poor prison conditions, Prison Emergency Act No. 18.667 was passed. The main purpose of this Act was to improve the facilities’ building and material conditions through a specific authorization to the Executive for extraordinary funding03. The act especially contemplates the erection of new prisons, the conclusion of unfinished works, and infrastructure improvement. Further, Budget Act No. 18.719 doubled the resources allocated to the Ministry of the Interior and resolved the creation of Instituto Nacional de Rehabilitación (National Prison Rehabilitation Institution) as a decentralized service04. These laws evidence that national prison policy envisages the expansion of the prison system.

The choice of the (semi) private prison management scheme In 2011, Gerencia de Evaluación de Proyectos (Project Evaluation Management) of Corporación Nacional para el Desarrollo (National Development Corporation) conducted a Profile Analysis (the “Analysis”) on the “building of a new prison for 2000 inmates”. This study highlights the expected increase in prison population when referring to “demand for prison places”. As a matter of fact, the Analysis approaches overpopulation in Uruguayan prisons from a supply-demand standpoint, and describes the adopted execution scheme05 as profitable for the State as well as a business opportunity for the private partner06.

Later, in 2012, a “Feasibility Report” prepared by Deloitte, a consulting firm, was published. This report clearly identifies three options to build a new prison: a public work contract, a public-private partnership, and privatization. The report recommends the second option07, and its “Economic rationality” section explicitly states that the new prison intends to promote qualitative changes in management processes in order to improve in-prison rehabilitation conditions08.

The agreement: context, stakeholders and design Background: on June 9, 2015 the Ministry of the Interior and a group of companies constituting the “Unidad Punta de Rieles S. A.” consortium signed Contrato para el Diseño, Construcción, Conservación y Operación de la Unidad de Personas Privadas de Libertad Nº 1 (Agreement for the Design, Building, Maintenance and Operation of Prisoners Unit No. 1) (hereinafter, the “Agreement”09). It is worth mentioning that in this Agreement the Hiring Administration is the Ministry of

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management changes that would help to overcome current serious problems of Uruguayan prisons, that jeopardize inmate rehabilitation”. National Development Corporation. Technical, Financial, Study… p. 21.

09 It should be pointed out that the Agreement is a complex instrument that incorporates by reference several other instruments, what not only makes its reading quite complex but also hinders the comprehensive understanding of the agreement’s scope and of the contents of certain obligations.

10 BRAGARD, J, “Reflexiones sobre el Financiamiento Privado en los Proyectos de Private-Public Partnership. La utilización del Mercado de Capitales”. In: Estudios de Derecho Administrativo, No. 6, Ed. La Ley Uruguay, Montevideo, 2012, pp. 289 and 290.

11 This official information can be found in the website of the Ministry of Economy and Finance. Visited on Feb. 18, 2018. http://ppp.mef.gub.uy/667/2/areas/ proyecto-recinto-penitenciario.html.

12 Source visited on Feb. 15, 2018: Diario El País, Angelina de los Santos “Una cárcel, mil incógnitas. Punta de Rieles: ¿El fin del hacinamiento?” https://www. elpais.com.uy/que-pasa/carcel-mil-incognitas.html 13 See Clause No. 62. “The term of this agreement shall be of 330 (three hundred and thirty) months as of the date of signature, without prejudice to changes to the term specified in contractual documents”.

14 See Clause No. 6.3.

15 Furthermore, see Clause No. 17: “As

the Interior. This apparently minor detail implies that the Ministry of the Interior, being the only key institutional stakeholder appointed to manage these units, becomes the manager of prisons forever.

The most relevant architectural characteristics of the new PPP prison are: an inmate diagnostic and allocation center with a hundred places within the prison; eight buildings and two residential modules; a 22-bed infirmary; visit rooms; a video-conference room; alternate-use rooms (gymnasium, theater, reading room, occupational workshops); general services and production workshops. All cells are equipped with a washstand and a toilet. There are 12 modules for 108 or 102 inmates, with 3-people cells; four modules for 125 inmate each, with 5-people cells; and two modules for 50 inmates each, with individual cells. All residential modules have a study room, a dining hall, a commissary, shared showers, an infirmary visiting room, a yard and emergency stairs. Security systems include high-tech security, fire detection, forbidden object detection, mobile phone inhibition, and communications.

The financing scheme is fully based on trading bonds on the Montevideo Stock Exchange, applying a project-bond10 initiative. The investment amounted to 717.7 millions of Unidades Indexadas (Indexed Units); offers were received for 1,080.7 millions of Indexed Units11, the main buyers being the companies engaged in retirement saving funds (AFAPS).

The outline of the business is: the private contractor will provide a certain quantity of “functional places” and certain services, such as INR inmate and staff food; infrastructure maintenance; security system maintenance and equipment; laundry room; cleaning and plague control; commissary and sale of groceries.

The Ministry of the Interior agrees to pay the private partner, for the provision of the functional places and services aforesaid, approximately 200 Indexed Units12 per place per day during 330 months13, on a quarterly basis. Health, security and rehabilitation services are specifically typified as “services excluded” from the obligations of the private partner14.

It is worth mentioning that payment obligation is especially subject to overpopulation15. Should prison population increase beyond 120 % of the facilities’ capacity, the State must pay an additional amount described in the Agreement as “overpopulation compensation”. This was a very much criticized aspect of the Chilean prison concession program; it was considered one of the factors determining the aggravation of the crisis of the prison system, and in particular, as a factor driving overpopulation. In our opinion, the main legal consequence of overpopulation is the State’s failure to keep the constitutional mandate of in-prison rehabilitation. This is why it is a mistake to say that re-socialization service is excluded from the Agreement, as this service is inherent in the logic underlying the overpopulation compensation clause.

for the PPL unit subject matter of this agreement, should the Inmate Daily Number (NDI) exceed for one or more days the facilities’ capacity, the Ministry of the Interior shall pay 90 UI (Indexed Units) per day, per inmate exceeding

The political economy of punishment and the financial government of surplus

prison capacity. (…) The Inmate Daily Number (NDI) must not exceed 120 % of the PPL operational capacity”.

16 RUSCHE and KIRCHHEIMER.

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The theories having studied in detail the relations between punishment and economic structure -hereinafter, political economy of punishment- have incorporated Marxist concepts and other theoretical tools of the critical paradigm.

The first public-private partnership experience in prisons in Uruguay

17 BUSTOS RAMIREZ says: “The Post-industrial State is looking for new courses of action, what evidences the crisis of the State’s role and, consequently, of State controls, especially criminal control. Criminal control can no longer be related to factory work; work discipline and work re-education through work lose their sense”. BUSTOS RAMIREZ, J: Control social y otros cambios. Obras Completas, Tomo II. Ediciones Jurídicas de Santiago, Santiago, 2012, p. 289.

18 It should be noted that the Supreme Court of the State of Paraná cancelled its private prison contracts on the grounds of unconstitutionality. Cfm. NATHAN, op. cit. p. 308. In addition, an almost unanimous decision (8 to 1) of Israeli Supreme Court of 2009, resolved that punishment is one of the State’s core functions, its delegation to private entities being inadmissible. The Court’s arguments were: (a) the management of prisons by private companies constitutes a violation of basic liberty added to the deprivation of liberty arising from punishment, as it diminishes the sovereignty integrity and legitimacy when turning prisoners into a means whereby the corporation that manages and operates the prison makes a financial profit; (b) a private entity employing governmental powers poses an unavoidable risk of an unjustified use of force. This risk is sufficiently high to classify the privatization as a potential infringement of prisoners’ rights; (c) there is a “right against privatization”, as inmates cannot be subject to the use

The first important study on the historical development of punishment systems, their anchorages and dynamic connections with social and economic structure has been attributed to Rusche and Kirchheimer. According to these authors, every production system tends to discover punishments which correspond to its productive relations16. Brief, the authors state a structural premise: punishments correspond to specific modes of production relations historically identifiable.

Moreover, this historical approach would clear the way to a new understanding of transformations and changes undergone by some specific punishment technologies. By way of example, and with reference to the changes underwent by prisons formerly sustained by the inmates’ profit-producing and productive work, transformed into unproductive confinement deposits entirely dependent on subsidies, the authors state this replacement can be easily explained in the light of the decrease of profitability of convict labor. Therefore, shifts in institutional logic, its disciplinary methods, daily management and discourse, should be explained by two external macroeconomic factors: the general fall in wages and the increase in labor availability in society.

A note on post-Fordist reflections: this is an interesting starting point, as it circumscribes the issue to a specific context defined by the exhaustion of the Fordist model and the deterritorialization of control mechanisms. Post-industrial State development also provoked an authentic crisis in the traditional organization of criminal control and its disciplinary discourse17.

And in this scenario of apparent crisis of confinement as a punishment method, several designs and ways of prison privatization operate as an actual technological upgrading. This privatization drive entails the possibility of reproducing the prison system and its main asset: the incarcerated individuals.

Based on this information, we should ask ourselves about the effects of these legal and financing schemes, and their relation with the reproduction of the prison system. Do they effectively join the confinement machinery and the punishment program of post-disciplinary societies, defined by De Giorgi as the government of surplus populations?

Finally, and in view of the increasing number of prison privatization cases, we should ask ourselves the unavoidable questions posed by Carranza, which we reproduce here as guidelines for future contributions: Is it constitutional to delegate the State’s function of enforcing the sentence?18 What are the advantages of private prisons? How much does the State save by delegating the enforcement of sentences? Is the privatization of the enforcement of sentences ethical?

of coercive measures by employees of private companies, which would infringe upon the inmates’ rights to liberty and human dignity. See: ARRIAGADA GAJEWSKI, I. “El monopolio estatal sobre el castigo: Privatización carcelaria y teoría retribucionista”, in Espacio Abierto Revista del CIEJ-AFJU Nº 21, 2010, p. 24; and MEDINA, B, “Constitutional limits to privatization: The Israeli Supreme Court decision to invalidate prison privatization”. In: International Journal of Constitutional Law, Volume 8, Issue 4, 1 October 2010, pp. 690 to 713.

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Fences

Fences, wire fences, walls, cameras, alarms, closed circuits, radars, dogs, security guards, electronic systems, etc.; all theseare part of the devices supposedly used for security, surveillance and protection purposes in new private and public spaces. The transparencies of the curtain walls and glass facades are false signals of a controlled architecture, where private and public spaces are dominated by psychological feelings of insecurity, paranoia and fear.

We must not forget that security and surveillance are amongst the most flourishing industries which are, ultimately, a subsidiary of the military

Antoni Muntadas is an artist born in Barcelona, a pioneer of media art and conceptual art in Spain. The serie Fences is part of the project The construction of fear, and particularly, the project for San Pablo, Brazil: Alphaville e outros.

(Text by Antoni Muntadas)

industry, and just like prison design and projection, they top the ranking in the construction business.

Roman and medieval cities built their walls for various reasons, mainly military, to preserve lands and power, under the supposed protection of their subjects. City planning has been defined and developed with urbanisms that extend the centre and create peripheries, but at the same time, these peripheries create paradoxes between public and private, the richest and the poorest.

The word suburb, of Latin origin and Anglo-Saxon concept, has got various translations in different contexts. It poses security as a reality and transforms closed communities into new redoubts where the security and surveillance industry finds an appropriate territory to develop.

by Antoni Muntadas

Fences

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Light disappearance act Ángel Borrego holds a Ph.D. in architecture from ETSA-Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura in Madrid and MArch from Princeton University where he was a Fulbright scholar. He has been a professor at Princeton University, the Pratt Institute in New York, the University of Alicante and now ETSAM. He founded Office for Strategic Spaces (OSS) in 1999 for the study of contemporary urban space and its economic, social and cultural implications. His range of works is very diverse: architecture and public space, collective research proposals such as IIAVE, American Constitution 2.0, Enlargement! AMMPLIO or the project wordww.net, exhibitions and publications.

Prisons are a special kind of architectural typology. It is one of a few building types that define a super-interior, an inside further than usual removed from an outside. It is a typology that separates interior and exterior spaces more intensely, by a greater amount of layers and control mechanisms.

If architecture is distinguished from other construction disciplines by its ability to define and produce an inhabitable interior, prisons should have then become an extreme (and perhaps preferred) source of architectural exploration. They aren’t.

The argument could be made that an incarceration program is so specific, and contrary to a humanistic definition of architecture as the space of free people, that it is rendered useless for anything else. This argument only survives in as much as we are willing to assume absolute, stable and ungraded definitions of freedom and obligation.

A more realistic argument would be that it is our ethic, or aesthetic, distaste for the function of prisons which prevents us from using them more often as theoretical testing grounds for the discipline of architecture…

A more cynic idea is that we simply dislike what prisons have to say about the discipline as a whole and its relationship to societal organization.

The dominant discussions about prisons since over thirty years ago deal with the system in place in the USA, the inflation in the number of inmates, and their establishment as a privatised services industry. As such, it is an industry whose main product is disappearance. Its business is turning invisible the largest possible number of bodies and also the infrastructure that makes it possible. We want people to gracefully disappear inside prisons, at least for a

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while. We would also like this process to appear inexpensive, absent of detail, without amenities, almost abstract in its formulation.

Vanishing Act 1: Forty years ago, at a brand-new federal prison in Florida, USA, its swimming pool was buried under a last minute tarmac extension. The flattening of the ground, the push for the disappearance of details describes the new social climate that would become dominant. The prison had been designed in the sixties and seventies, a time when institutions were under suspicion and softness was regarded as the desired strategy for social design.

But when it came to be built in the early eighties desires had changed and the new wave of conservatism that would sweep the world had ‘zero tolerance’ as its most marketable, and sadly successful, social design.

Vanishing Act 2: Up until the seventies, prisons were a relevant space for thought.

As society defines its limits, and what is acceptable or not, discussions around incarceration appear a healthy exercise. Foucault formulated philosophical thought, filmmakers treated incarceration as a respected, ‘thoughtful’ genre, architects even held competitions for ‘ideal’ prison design. Prisons, as a radical space typology, was still a relevant place for architecture then. Rem studied his voluntary prisoners in Exodus and Superstudio dealt with the immutable issues of incarceration in their architecture tales in the seventies. But prisons have been absent from architecture thought ever since. They have disappeared without trace, apparently dissolved into thin air. They only remain as practical problem resolution and service provision.

Vanishing Act 3: Recent prison design in Spain has followed a generic trend, pushed away from cities and suburban areas to deserted sites in between them. Their design of these newer prisons, many of them built in the last twenty-five years, follows a very precise, standard, almost abstract, orthogonal layout. No context needs to be taken into account, as if it actually didn’t exist. To keep the surrounding area deserted at all times the lighting specs mandate for flood lighting to be rotated ninety degrees from the usual exterior lighting. Whereas exterior artificial lighting is usually placed where one expects people to be, and is designed to point downwards, shooting light immediately underneath the light source, outside prisons light is placed on the prison outer limits and it points straight out, perpendicular to the usual direction of artificial lighting. This lighting is designed to expel people from it, not to attract them. While artificial lighting is usually meant to attract people, or is meant to be used where people naturally meet already, at prisons lighting is supposed to empty space of people, to make the disappear. The ninety degree rotation in the field of prison lights leaves no trace, no projection, in the universe of civil lighting, they belong, so to speak, to a different universe.

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to spend two weeks in a simulated jail in the basement of the Stanford School of Psychology.

As days went by, an overwhelming atmosphere took over the situation. Using different techniques, the inmates were forced to abandon their identities and were constantly humiliated. They developed some pathological behaviours while some guards started to have sadistic conducts, denigrating and abusing the inmates in many ways.

After only six days, several moral questionable situations were noticed, which led to the simulation being cancelled.

Stanford Prison experiment

Known as the “Stanford Prison Experiment�, the aim of this experiment was to investigate the psychological effects of turning someone into a prisoner or a guard, observing how the prison institution influences the behaviour of its inmates.

Twenty-four volunteer male students were selected and randomly assigned a prisoner or guard character

The Stanford Prison Experiment was carried out by a team of researchers led by Philip Zimbardo of the Stanford University in 1971.

Font: prisonexp.org

conducted by Philip Zimbardo

Stanford prison experiment

img 05

img 01

img 04

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img 03

img 02

img 05 Prisoners Facing the Wall and Doing Push-ups, Stanford Experiment, 1971. Copyright free image, taken from prisonexp.org.

img04 Meeting with the Superintendent, Stanford Experiment, 1971.

Copyright free image, taken from prisonexp.org.

img 03 Handcuffing Prisoner #8612, Stanford Experiment, 1971.

Copyright free image, taken from prisonexp.org.

img 02 Stanford County Prison, Stanford Experiment, 1971.

Copyright free image, taken from prisonexp.org.

img 01 Ad for Participants, Stanford Experiment, 1971.

Copyright free image, taken from prisonexp.org.

PRISON? A question instead of a statement Natalia Agati, Olimpia Fiorentino, Serena Olcuire01 are three young architects socially involved and interested in urban research and independent artistic practice to explore the contradictions of contemporary space. Together they conducted a research in 2012, on the occasion of the thesis degree in architecture. The study concerns the prison space and tries to investigate the main issues related to the detention space and concerning the social, philosophical, territorial, spatial and sensorial aspects of prison.

Prison is often defined as a deforming mirror of society. The space of detention in closely related to historical events, social situation and political mandate of the moment and it cannot be reconsidered prescinding them.

It is not possible to obtain answers from the prison, and it is not possible to offer proposals for it: the only possible way out is to organize the investigation of the doubt itself.02 Prison has not always existed: the idea of confinement as a form of punishment has its origins in the Enlightenment philosophy, as an opposition to tortures and public pillories of the Middle Age. In his masterpiece, Dei delitti e delle pene, Cesare Beccaria outlines the values of modern prisons: re-education and not-affliction of the offender’s body.

But confinement model has more ancient roots. Critical criminology traces its origins to the birth of the Work Houses, with the first Poor Law03: women, children and infirms are taken in charge by the public care, while able, young males are inmates in workhouses, the Houses of Correction. The model spread all over Europe and over the centuries evolved in a series of institutions of social control: from the asylum to the orphanage, the prison is just the latest born. This subsidiary-corrective system is part of an inclusive, anthropophagic model04: in the bulimic society, the hostile is swallowed with the hope of neutralizing his danger.

In Italy, in the early years after the 1861 unification, the prison construction is domi-

01 More info at carcerrario.wix.com/carcerrario 02 This contribution is rooted in a wider work on the spaces of detention, developed in occasion of a Master thesis in architecture. For this reason, datas are to be considered updated to the 2012-2013 biennium. Unfortunately, changes are so slow that we can consider these datas almost current.

03 Mid-sixteenth century, during the Tudor legislation 04 Z. Bauman, Amore liquido, Rizzoli, Milano 2004

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nated by two architectural models: the reuse of monasteries, castles and palaces adjusted to prisons and the construction of radial complexes explicitly referring to the previous examples in the USA. The first penal code of neo-united Italy05 triggers the first Piano Carceri [Prisons Plan]. The adopted model is the telegraph pole: a cellular system of detention buildings parallelly arranged and crossed from just one central link. The scheme, standardized and spread throughout the national territory, claim the best rationalization of spaces, but a drastic reduction of the Plan funding will cause a breakdown of quality, leaving a large number of buildings in extremely poor conditions.

The next turning point comes after the Second World War, when those who experienced the poor conditions and the inhumanity of Italian prisons as partisans, become member of the Parliament. Once the republican constitution is made, the point is to carry out its new democratic principles, considering that the penal code was, and still is, the 1931 one06, produced by a dictatorial regime. A parliamentary committee is established and the magazine Il Ponte07 promotes, through the considerations of Resistance heroes, a debate on the reform of the prison institution. Such desired reform will have to wait twenty-five years to see the light.

During this long wait some experimentations are pursued: the telegraph pole loses its rigidity and spaces start to articulate.

There are some experiences to be mentioned: Mario Ridolfi, with the design of Cosenza and Nuoro prisons; Sergio Lenci, with Rebibbia in Rome; and Inghirami, Mariotti and Campani with Sollicciano institute in Florence. These are the only episodes of real interest in this matter led by architectural culture, witnessing an attempt of spalling the models they inherited.

In the meantime Italian prisons are still unbearable and during the late 60’s they are flooded by the new wave of protests. Riots give the final push to approve the Reform (1975)08, but at the same time they are also an excuse to dull some of its more innovative principles in order to restore control in the institutes. The resulting lack of improvements in prisons triggers a new wave of riots, more structured because of the presence of political prisoners that during the anni di piombo overcrowds prisons across the country. The climax of this period is the creation of a compact, new model, with a drastic reduction of the distances and of inmates’ open areas. Twenty-eight copies of this prison are scattered across the Italian countryside.The emergency situation encourages a derogation system on transparency in tenders that will end of the carceri d’oro [golden prison] scandal.

The ‘90s witnessed a return to the telegraph pole, extended over much wider sites and placed each time more distant from urbanized areas. Despite the general trend of the city to remove the places it wants to hide, until the ‘70s prisons had been kept within the urban fabric.

The drastic removal has been motivated at the time by security needs, but nowadays responds to a general will. In 2001 a draft law denounces the unaesthetic features of the institutes and therefore that keeping them within cities is anachronistic.

05 Codice Zanardelli, 1889 06 Codice Rocco, 1931, The main author, Alfredo Rocco, was Minister of Justice under Mussolini government.

07 Bisogna aver visto da Il Ponte, politics and literature magazine directed by Pietro Calamandrei, 1949.

08 Riforma dell’Ordinamento Penitenziario, 1975

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img 01 L’unità d’Italia - Image by the authors

The current debate is limited about this. The prison in the city is more accessible by defenders, family members and volunteers, but often complains crumbling, outdated and hardly adaptable to current legislative requirements facilities. The prison out, on the contrary, has wider spaces, adequate and convertible, but it is unlikely reachable by social networks.

There are 206 institutes on the Italian territory, hosting an average of 144 people each 100 beds, while the European average is 96.6. Three are the most responsible for the overcrowding: the immigration law, the drugs law and the law on recidivism. It is therefore a social incarceration, counting 37% of foreigners and 40% of inmates for drug-related offenses. The European Court of Human Rights has, however, ruled that the Italian overcrowding is a problem of a structural nature, consistent over time and homogeneous throughout territory. From the Sulejmanovic case09 Italy was convicted and fined several

09 Sulejmanovic v. Italy, 16.07.2009, regarding the applicant’s conditions of detention during 4 months in Rebibbia Prison (Rome).

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ties for inhuman and degrading treatment and gets continuous reprimands and warnings for the state of its prisons.

Even if the overcrowding is now a constitutive and structural problem of Italy, governments continue to relate to it through a cyclical process, based on state of emergency and the creation of an ad hoc laws apparatus. This allows the elaboration of a Prison Plan for the construction of new buildings, derogating city plans, expropriation safeguards and transparency in tenders. The process normally clashes with the severe lack of funds, ending the Prison Plan and postponing the problem.

The Plan philosophy can be summarized in three points: 1) Create modern facilities, designed in accordance with the most advanced programs of detention. But the re-educational strategy in Italy didn’t make any progress in respecting the Reform of ‘75, which still remains largely unapplied.

2) Decongest the most populated areas of large cities, building the new interventions in more decentralized areas as possible. But removal is not compatible with re-socialization and reintegration, which are established by 27th article of the Constitution.

3) The expansion interventions on existing structures should not invalidate re-educational services and existing socialization spaces. But as there are no acquisitions of new lands, we may notice that the only still buildable areas are nothing but currently open air and re-educational services areas.

Who works in prisons knows that once a container is built, it will be quickly filled.

The new pavilions are in many cases not enough to solve not even the local overcrowding, and in general all the Plan interventions seem to be a palliative rather than a more radical solution to a structural problem.

Over the past decade the Italian prison system costed 29 billion euro. Each inmates daily costs € 112.81. Of this amount, € 6.48 is allocated to the effective maintenance (food, treatment, care and education), while the 87.7% of total spending, € 99, is used to cover the costs of the prison staff.

The economy of control, however, has higher costs rather than purely economic ones.

Many studies explore the effects of detention on a physical and psychological level10. Prison strongly influences the physical health of the inmate, seriously altering sensory perceptions, even after a very short detention time: anosmia, myopia, disorientation and loss of balance, nerves hyperactivity, panic and generalized anxiety.

Despite the penalty of modernity is the deprivation of freedom, today ancient and modern forms of bodily affliction continue to coexist.

Article 27 of the Italian Constitution states that the punishment cannot consist in treatments which are contrary to the human dignity and must aim at the rehabilitation of the convicted.

But our detention model is infantilizing11, foreclosing and inefficient in terms of re-education: the recidivism rate for those who served their first conviction in prison is 68%.

The prison should be based on law, and yet it represents its systematic violation. It is the space of the systematic use of discretionary policy of who governs it, being one of the major spaces of exception of the contemporary era.

Prison is res publica, a subject which should be took in charge by the community. Yet it remains an object, hidden and hiding, excluded and excluding: if in the Middle Ages we

10 We quote here just two of them: D. Gonin, Il corpo incarcerato, Gruppo Abele, Torino, 1994; R.Tomasi, G. Brandi, M. Iannucci, R. Gervasi, Valutazione dei problemi di salute mentale dei detenuti nella Casa Circondariale di Firenze Sollicciano e degli osservandi nell’Ospedale Psichiatrico Giudiziario di Montelupo Fiorentino, 2001-2002.

11 M.Palma, Due modelli a confronto, in Il corpo e lo spazio della pena, Ediesse, Roma 2011

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img 02 Labirinto - Image by the authors

img 03 Il Carcere - Image by the authors

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witnessed a spectacularization of punishment, modern society has wisely hidden its dark side from the public view.

As three young architects, for a long time we tried to find a constructive proposal, investigating the complexity of the issue and its possible facets: many ideas fascinated us from time to time, but for each one some aspects were so unacceptable to invalidate the proposal itself.

Each idea of prison was an impassable road, an aporia. Aporia is the inability to give a precise answer to a problem because there are different solutions seemingly feasible, but which in their opposing end up to invalid themselves.

We tessellated most of these suggestions, ordering them according to the lines of reasoning that they were sharing. The result is a reasoning on different scales, from the territory to the cell, and in more dimensions: each piece can be seen in its uniqueness or in the overall composition. It is the design of a city of errors, made of archetypal forms and traces of real patterns. It is the confrontation with the uncanny. Freud12 traces the etymology of the German word heimlich, which starting from home and passing through concealed gets to the meaning of hidden, dangerous. It is then something that could remain secret, hidden, and that instead came to the surface. The first effect of the uncanny on the space is the lack of orientation, the difficulty in finding the way. The project is a labyrinth generated by the ethics of doubt, a dialectic space, a round table, an object to interact with both physically and intellectually.

It is the collective research for an escape route.

12 S. Freud, Das Unheimliche, 1919

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Video surveillance

The Uruguayan artist Matías Nin works critically from this universe of images that define the way we live our time, but seem to go unnoticed. Images taken by drones in war conflicts, selfies

Hour after hour, day after day, thousands of security cameras film us.

Their records, perhaps, will never be seen by anyone, unless something extraordinary happens. Our cities and spaces for interaction are lived and filmed at the same time.

All behavior will be observed. No longer by humans, but by machines, through algorithms made for recognizing behaviors that deviate from behaviors defined as normal.

Matías Nin is a visual artist from Uruguay.

by Matías Nin

Video Surveillance, oil on canvas, 2012.

*Images courtesy of the artist.

of women posing semi-nude, shots of medical imaging, scenes of urban video surveillance cameras.

Thus, his oil paintings freeze some instants of those millions of hours of filming that reproduce the world infinitely. It stops the flow of information and raises its content, we could say, ironically and poetically, to question it, and question us.

Video surveillance

Video Surveillance, oil on canvas, 2013.

Video Surveillance, oil on canvas, 2014.

Video Surveillance, oil on canvas, 2013.

Video Surveillance, oil on canvas, 2013.

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From rehabilitation to collective transformation

by Natalia Laino Topham* 1 Zaffaroni, E. (2012). La cuestión criminal. Buenos Aires: Planeta.

2 Foucault, M. (2002). Vigilar y Castigar. Nacimiento de la prisión.

Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, Editores Argentina.

3 Ibidem.

*Psychologist. Professor at the School of Psychology of Universidad de la República. Master degree in Social Psychology. She is engaged in prison-related work.

rehabilitate… rehabilitate oneself… rehabilitate ourselves…. transform ourselves…

Thinking of security, and consequently, of prisons, refers us –in the bestcase scenario– to the concept of rehabilitation. And it is in the best-case scenario because still today the punitive common sense approach is widely valid; as Eugenio Zaffaroni (2012) says, we are still in the Middle Ages, “it is not the past that is back but a past that has never gone, because there lies punitive power, verticalization as its role, its expansive trends, its lethal outcomes”.1 The shift from torture –the art of unbearable sensations– to imprisonment –the economy of suspended rights– was apparently a proof of evolution of our punishing methods, a supposed “humanization” that left behind the atrocity of such punishments2. However, Foucault says that this would be more a new economy of punishment than an evolution, and that it is not about punishing less but about punishing better, of introducing the power to punish more deeply into the social body but with an attenuated severity. “Why would society eliminate a life and a body that it could appropriate? (...) far more telling than death would be the example of a man who is ever before one’s eyes, whom one has deprived of liberty, and who is forced to spend the rest of his life repairing the loss he has caused society”.3 This new economy implied the transition from punishing an act to punishing a life; being more specific, it implied the construction of a biography, leaving aside what the individual did and focusing on who the individual is and will be capable of doing in the future. Then, the new target of punishment will be the correction and remedy of the criminal; concomitantly, new extrajudicial stakeholders will come out to turn the subject into an object of knowledge. In this scenario, the experts –psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers– will play a privileged role in the study of abnormality, in the explanation of behavior and also in prognosis and prediction. In this sense, rehabilitation involves the alleged “humanization” and conceals the punitive sense which made it valid. Concealed, the punitive will now operate through the penitentiary technique –assisted by treatment techniques– thus transforming the offender into a criminal.

Within the framework of the penitentiary reform and with the creation of the National Rehabilitation Institute, Uruguay has tried to leave behind the strictly custodial approach to promote one that succeeds in developing rehabilitation and social inclusion of the imprisoned population: “Today, we all know that

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4 Ministerio del Interior. (2014). Los caminos a la libertad. Montevideo: Ministerio del Interior.

5 Deleuze, G. (2009). Diferencia y repetición. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu.6.

Foucault, M. (1983). El sujeto y el poder (Epílogo). Translation: Santiago Carassale and Angélica Vitale. In H. Dreyfus, & P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (pp.

1-31). Chicago. Chicago University Press.

7 Laino, N. (2015). Producciones Peligrosas. Miradas y palabras sobre la delincuencia femenina en el estudio para la libertad anticipada. Master Thesis in Social Psychology. Montevideo: UR, FP 8 Deligny, F. (2015) Lo arácnido y otros textos, Cactus. Buenos Aires.

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the complexity of rehabilitation lies in the fact that crime is the outcome of a social circumstance where interaction occurs among education, community, employment, relationships with others, family, health, social and affective capabilities, and the values that form or deform us through different means”.4 “Rehabilitation” has multiple meanings, and not much discussion and agreement exist about its origin. What we can realize, in general, is that this policy is approached from the idea of treatment, work and study, id est., it is linked to an image of thought5 that generates the conditions of possibility of certain subject-formation.

Many different stories mix together in the underlying reasons for imprisonment: serving a sentence, being punished, “paying a debt to society”, “letting them rot in jail”, getting an intimidating effect, changes in subjective positions, achieving recognition of responsibility and remorse, acquiring productive life habits, among others. Through this approach, prison is seen as a means of accomplishing the technical and disciplinary transformation of individuals, and in the best-case scenario, “their rehabilitation”. In the best-case scenario, is this the best we have managed to accomplish collectively? And if it is the best… in what sense?

Although the notion of rehabilitation implies an approach to punishment other than the punitive approach, from its very conception it advocates correction: it is assumed that a “somebody” exists –and from this notion– this “somebody” should be corrected. In this way, the biographical acquires an essential place in punishment: it will make the criminal exist before committing the crime. To place the issue in the biographical sphere implies exposing the criminal behavior as an individual feature of people –a legacy from the positivist criminology– thus ignoring the productive place of the penitentiary technique that transforms offenders into criminals. The fiction is exposed of the subject as determination, creation, forgetting that subject formation may be an effect of production rather than truth formation.6 The place of rehabilitation will be linked to the measure of relapse, that is to say, the construction of a biography and of a life history. And rehabilitation will only be possible to the extent a change in the individual occurs, but not as a transformation that challenges subjects as such, the ways in which we have been objectivized, constructed, produced, but as correction and acknowledgment of a responsibility that will allow to assume individuality and existence as a criminal.7 Critical criminology has contributed elements to shift the focus from individuals to problematization of practices, to ask ourselves who are considered deviated from the norm, who labels, how is labeling made, and what it is done for that network to work, rather than to ask ourselves who the criminal is.8 The object of study of criminology will no longer be the offender but the circumstances that create and manage delinquency; the study of criminology will give room to the study of criminalization processes.

For a long time we have been realizing that the notion of rehabilitation is insufficient; it has been exhausted in its own conception; we should change the way we set up problems; we should force thought, we should look for new images. We are facing the great challenge of setting up other ways of thinking that allow shifting from the logic of the individual to a relational network. It is necessary to leave aside the concept of subject originated in a hegemonic model in which “the individual as a prototype of the singular, and the union between

From rehabilitation to collective transformation

9 Lee Teles, A. (2010). Política afectiva: un aporte filosófico a la cuestión de la subjetividad. Espacio Pensamiento.

Retrieved from https://epensamientoweb.wordpress.com/articulos/politica-afectiva/ 10 Lee Teles, A. (2010). Política afectiva: un aporte filosófico a la cuestión de la subjetividad. Espacio Pensamiento. Retrieved from https://epensamientoweb.wordpress.com/articulos/ politica-afectiva/ 11 Guattari, F. (1976). Psicoanálisis y transversalidad. Buenos Aires: Siglo veintiuno.

individuals separated from each other as a prototype of the plural”, prevail. “In this way, the pattern upholding individual and the sum of individuals as an expression of the relational is perpetuated”.9 To accomplish this we should pay attention to Spinoza’s philosophical claim as a contribution to collective, relational and affective transformation, for, as Manuel Delgado says “we are not human beings building relationships, we are the relationship between human beings, and of human beings with things, joining together from a vast number of lines, trajectories, movements”.10 The attempt to correct, to “rehabilitate” the “individual”, is still having a failed, frustrating outcome; perhaps this is the reason why we have the solutions we deserve to the problems we have managed to expose. Focusing on collective transformation implies a new way of setting up the problem. It will no longer be a transformation in terms of the sum of corrected subjects, because the very idea of subject has been exhausted, but a collective transformation capable of approaching the mess, the network, the relational issues, the power of impacting and being impacted.

Spinoza proposes a new image of thought where it is possible to think of ourselves as a potential –what we are capable of– and leave behind the idea of thinking of subjects in terms of their essence –what they are–. Thinking of ourselves from the standpoint of “what we are” implied the construction of a world with different characters that believe what they are: as well as criminals are produced, children, women, men, heterosexuals, homosexuals, lunatics, normal people, deviants, psychopaths, perverse individuals, female snatchers, murderers, experts, judges, psychologists, female doctors, teachers, female professors, are produced. As Guattari says “the subject is not necessarily the individual, not even one individual. We should go and unbury the subject from the heart of his alienation, reopen the potentiality of his history in the dullness of his situation”.11 This new image proposed by Spinoza is essential to embark ourselves in a collective transformation that, from the standpoint of an anti-hierarchical philosophy, implies building new ethical encounters. And the construction of ethical encounters allows us to pay attention to what we are capable of correcting and of giving up what we should be. It is a different way of thinking ourselves, no longer based on biographies (construction of a life history, of what we are) but on encounters and the unfolding of our power, what we are capable of doing.

We should not forget the images of thought involved in the notion of rehabilitation of incarcerated people; perhaps this allows us to shift from the logic of correction to transformation modalities, to singularizing processes, but no longer of them but of each one of us.

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Disciplinary architecture Hélio Menezes studied International Relations and Social Sciences at Sao Paulo University (USP). Master’s degree and PhD, Graduate Program in Social Anthropology, USP. He is an independent curator and researcher of Núcleo de Estudos dos Marcadores Sociais da Diferença (NUMAS-USP).

Of the five countries with the world’s largest prison population, two are in Latin-America. In round numbers, Brazil and Mexico rank first in this wicked regional scenario.

These countries have implemented a business-prison system that is both the product and the producer of a devastating reality of violence, inequality and justice mechanism selectivity prevailing especially in Latin America. In turn, Uruguay holds the shameful record of concentrating the largest proportion of prison population in the Latin-American subcontinent: 300 incarcerated individuals every 100,000 inhabitants.

But these are not isolated facts. These numbers evidence a problem at the core of each country’s political system that spreads throughout the continent: the paradox of a prison system that has failed and at the same time provokes such a high and alarming growth in incarceration rates. Although obsolete both from theoretical and practical perspectives, new prisons are being commissioned on a constant basis. This is really scary, but mass incarceration is a successful business, and it should be clearly stated: prisons exist and multiply because they are profitable. There is no “corrective measure”, “social reinsertion”, “educational punishment for those contravening the public order”: usury, profit and gain dictate the rules and set the pace.

We all know that of all the prison’s sins, the most alarming is inefficacy, the impossibility of fulfilling the established goals. Prisons are not good at resocializing confined individuals, they do not help reducing the rates of the social violence they are supposed to fight, they do not work as counterexamples to prevent new crimes, and they offer a false illusion of security that reality refutes. On the contrary, the growth in the number of correctional facilities goes pari passu with the growth in crime rates and types of criminal contraventions. Prisons are dangerous organizations that encourage what they are meant to mitigate.

In order to work, the prison system needs to trigger the whole State machinery, funded by public funds, to hire more police officers, invest in investigative technology, buy more guns, more ammunition, build more prison places, thus feeding a smiling industry that is thankful for every new prison. As Brazilian rap singer Mano Brown intelligently summarizes, quoting singer Bezerra da Silva: “prison is like a show: you need a full house to make money”1.

In a gray and undefined area between public and private, the “modern” prison system is a fertile ground for PPP –public-private partnerships– that subordinate a social (and therefore, public, both by definition and principle) issue to market interests and to the logic of profit that governs all business enterprises. Numbers are simple: the higher the number of categorized crimes, the higher the number of potential criminals, and the higher the number of incarcerated individuals, the higher the profit for prison owners.

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It does not matter whether the conditions to transform a free person into a convict are actually accomplished. We should not be appalled (although this is absolutely appalling information) by the fact that 40% of incarcerated individuals in Brazil are still waiting for sentence, i.e. are still waiting for the due process. In Uruguay, the rate of prisoners waiting for sentence is 69.7%. Most of them have been charged for crimes against property.

And you do not need to be a genius or an engineer to know what’s the water that makes mills grind: black, Native Indians, poor and immigrant youths –society dropouts– that have historically filled police and prison records from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska. The punishment selectivity applied is evident. Thus, the prison system another extreme locus of exertion of power and social hierarchization and, as it extends beyond prison limits, it operates as an authorized –or at least, tolerated– tool to solve social conflicts and issues through punishment and violence. It works as pedagogy of oppression: it ratifies the legal possibility of ill-treatment and inhibits the political capability to imagine alternative models to deal with law violation. A necessary evil is established as the only option.

Philosopher Michel Foucault draws our attention to the anachronism inherent in prisons that have needed to be “reformed” since their creation. Prison is in essence an unfinished project that combines and integrates different dispositions, discourses and fields of knowledge for its permanent improvement. He says: “From the point of view of the law, detention may be a mere deprivation of liberty. But the imprisonment that performs this function has always involved a technical project. The transition from the public execution, with its spectacular rituals, its art mingled with the ceremony of pain, to the penalties of prisons buried in architectural masses and guarded by the secrecy of administrations, is not a transition to an undifferentiated, abstract, confused penality; it is the transition from one art of punishing to another, no less skillful one. It is a technical mutation”2.

Disciplinary architecture –as any other architecture– is not and cannot be considered just a piece of technical information, isolated from the purpose at its origin, the reason why it was designed and built: deprivation of liberty, application and development of surveillance and punishment technologies. In this case the form –as any form– means content.

And vice-versa. Therefore, what’s the role of architects and other construction professionals in this necropolitical monument3 called “prison”, be it modern or old, “humanized” or not?

When will architecture stop pretending it has nothing to do with this debate, with the poor excuse of being a non-political activity? What’s its role in devising alternatives to the prison model, in creating ruling spaces not implying confinement and torture disguised as security and modernity?

We should learn from the comparison between prison models: every prison is a setback for reason. Every prison is a tumor within the heart of the social tissue. The most deep and radical political challenge, the most utopian and nevertheless urgent and necessary challenge on this issue since the beginning, has not been its reform but its deconstruction. Or, as philosopher Angela Davis questioned, “as important as some reforms may be –the elimination of sexual abuse and medical neglect in women’s prison, for example–, frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison. (…) How can we take seriously strategies of restorative rather than exclusively punitive justice?4”

1 “Cadeia é que nem show: precisa estar lotada para dar dinheiro”. Mano Brown. “Um sobrevivente do inferno”.

An interview for Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil, January 8, 2018: http://diplomatique.org.br/um-sobrevivente-do-inferno/.

2 Michel Foucault. Vigiar e Punir. Petrópolis, Vozes, 1987.

3 Achille Mbembe. “Necropolitics”, In: Public Culture, 15 (1), 2003: 11-40.

4 Ângela Davis. Are prisons obsolete?. New York: Open Media, 2013.

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Americano

In Americano, Berna Reale, walks through the dark and shadowy hallways of a maximum security prison complex in the Brazilian northeast in sportswear and holding an Olympic torch in her hands.

The torch appears as a symbol of purification, light and knowledge, and the fire a legacy of the social riots that occurred in 2013 all around the country.

Besides being an artist, Reale is a Criminal Expert, so she is constantly in touch with a wide variety of social-related conflicts. In the last few years, she has focused on violence as the main subject for her artistic creations.

In her performances she uses her own body to generate a feeling of estrangement in order to expand our perception field, inviting us to think over contemporary politics and society.

Berna Reale is a Brazilian artist who produces performances and installations to reflect on the contemporary socio-political moment.

by Berna Reale

Americano

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*Images courtesy of the artist.

Americano, 2013.

Art and Literacy Luis Camnitzer is a Uruguayan artist. He immigrated to Uruguay from Germany when he was one year old and has lived in the US since 1964. He is a Professor Emeritus of Art, State University of New York, College at Old Westbury. He graduated in sculpture from the Escuela de Bellas Artes, Universidad de la República, Uruguay, where he also studied architecture.

He received a Guggenheim fellowship for printmaking in 1961 and for visual arts in 1982.

In 1965 he was declared Honorary Member of the Academy in Florence. He represented Uruguay in the Venice Biennial 1988 and participated in the Liverpool Biennial in 1999 and in 2003, the Whitney Biennial of 2000, and Documenta 11 in 2003. His work is in the collections of over forty museums. His books include: New Art of Cuba, University of Texas Press; Arte y Enseñanza: La ética del poder; Didactics of Liberation: Conceptualist Art in Latin America; and On Art, Artists, Latin America and Other Utopias.

You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.

—George W. Bush, in a speech given in Townsend, Tennessee, February 21, 2001

Interestingly, at least in the languages I know, when one talks about alphabetization there is always the mention of reading and writing, in that order. Ideologically speaking, this prioritized order not only reflects the division between production and consumption, but subliminally emphasizes the latter: ignorance is shown more by the inability to read than by the inability to write. Further, this order suggests that alphabetization is more important for the reception of orders than for their emission.

Of course, this theory—that if one wants to be able to write something, one should know how it is written—has some logic to it. It forces one first to read, then to copy what one reads—to understand somebody else’s presentation in order to then re-present it. In art terms, however, this is similar to saying that one has to first look at the model in order to then copy it. Now the logical construction becomes much less persuasive. This is not necessarily wrong, insofar as one really wants to copy the model, or the need to copy the model is well grounded.

In essence, if there is no proven need, the logical construction ceases to be one—it becomes a dogma disguised as logic.

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This theory establishes first that the model deserves to be copied, second that there is a merit in making a reasonably faithful copy, and third that this process is useful to prepare the artist to produce art. This idea is a leftover from the nineteenth century, and its relevance today is highly questionable. An artist then has to ask whether the problems posed today by alphabetization might not be in need of new and more contemporary approaches. Is there an analysis of these problems informed by the attitudes that removed art from the nineteenth century and brought it into the twentieth? In other words, is alphabetization a tool to help presentation or re-presentation? Where is power located? Is it granted to the literate-to-be or to be found in the system that wants him or her to be literate?

One tends to speak of art as a language. In some cases it is even described as a universal language, a kind of Esperanto capable of transcending all national borderlines. As a universal language, stressing universal, art serves the interests of colonization and the expansion of an art market. The notion of art as a plain language, however, underlines a notion of it as a form of communication. In this case, power is not granted to the market, but to those who are communicating.

Educational institutions expect everybody to be able to learn how to read and write. It would follow that, if everybody has the potential to use reading and writing for expression, everybody should also have the potential to be an artist. Yet in art the assumption is different.

Everybody may be able to appreciate art, but only a few are expected to produce it—not all readers are writers. Such inconsistent expectations overlook the fact that, just as alphabetization should not aim for Nobel Prizes in literature, art education should not aim for museum retrospectives. Nobel Prizes and retrospectives are more indicative of a kind of triumphal competitiveness than of good education. Put simply, good education exists to develop the ability to express and communicate. This is the importance of the concept of “language” here, the implication being that both art and alphabetization can be linked to nurture each other.

img 01 McGuffey’s Eclectic Spelling Book, published in 1879.

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Reading, Writing, and the Rest At this moment, we are in the precise middle of the decade that the United Nations has designated as the Decade for Alphabetization (alphabetization here used in the sense of education for literacy). UNESCO estimates that there are 39 million illiterates in Latin America and the Caribbean, roughly 11% of whom are adults.01 16 million of them are in Brazil. These statistics only include people who do not know how to read or write. If we add those who are functionally illiterate—people who have the techniques, but are not able to use them to understand or to develop ideas—these figures grow astronomically. In developing countries, one out of every five people older than 15 is considered illiterate. Among developed countries, nearly 5% of the population of Germany, for example, is functionally illiterate. And among literate students in the US, it is estimated that 75% of those finishing high school do not have the reading skills required for college.

The teaching of reading and writing has been a major part of the schooling mission for over two centuries. It has also been on the minds of countless specialists who ponder gaps in formal education in both expected and unexpected sectors of the public. That everybody should know how to read and write is taken for granted. However, beyond vague truisms regarding its function, there is little discussion about how those abilities are used. And yet the problem of illiteracy persists even in countries claiming to have eradicated it.

Art has dealt with illiteracy on amazingly rare occasions, and when it did, it did so mostly of its own accord, keeping within its disciplinary identity and confusions, among them an idea that appreciating art is for everyone while making art is for the few. This means that art’s main strengths—speculation, imagination, and its questions of “what if?”—have not really been explored on those occasions. Supposedly art is art and the rest is the rest. Art, however, happens to be the rest, too.

My Imperialism Forty years ago, I was invited to organize the art department in a US university. I refused on the grounds that art is not really “art,” but a method to acquire and expand knowledge.

Consequently, art should shape all academic activities within a university and not be confined to a discipline. I recognize that my position reflected a form of art-imperialism, and this is something I still adhere to. As in all imperialisms, my position was not necessarily based on solid information and I used aggression as a tool for persuasion. Predictably, I was defeated, and shortly after was condemned to solitary confinement in the art department I had so proudly rejected. Yet I am unrepentant: I continue to operate with poorly informed opinions, I continue to be aggressive, and, to be sure, I will continue to be defeated.

01 According to a National Adult Literacy Survey cited in 1996 by the National Right to Read Foundation, 42 million adult Americans cannot read. According to a 2003 report by the National Institute for Literacy, “The mean prose literacy scores of US adults with primary or no education, ranked 14th out of 18 high-income countries”.

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My imperialism is based on a generalist view of art in which everything (including the “rest”) can be seen as art. I also believe that the social structures that divide us into producers and consumers—those that ensure that our lives conform to the laws of the market instead of seeking a collective well-being—should be demolished. These were the views we developed as students during the late 1950s while I was in art school in Uruguay. These views took for granted that such a broad definition of art, in which everybody could be a creator, would become a tool for improving society. We were defeated then, and today these beliefs are considered anachronistic and out of place.

Regardless of their feasibility, these perspectives had some importance because they introduced an awareness of the role and distribution of power in matters of art and education that should not be ignored. They clarified claims surrounding the ownership of knowledge, how that ownership is distributed, and who benefits from it. Even if these issues are normally considered to be outside the scope of art, it is on their account that the use of language and the means of engaging illiteracy become interesting to art.

Indoctrinating Subversion Both art education and alphabetization have in common the dual and often contradictory mission of facilitating individual and collective cultural affirmation and expression on the one hand, and of being necessary tools to cement and expand forms of consumption on the other. Consequently, education is not only an ideologically fractured field, but one in which each of its ideologies assumes its own particular pedagogical approach to apply to all fields of knowledge, overcoming all irresolvable contradictions. When reasonably progressive, such pedagogies assume that one can ensure the stability and smoothness of the existing society while at the same time forming critically questioning, non-submissive, creative individuals. This approach takes for granted that education will create good, accepting citizens who play by the rules, but who will also be subversive individuals attempting to change that society. In a conservative pedagogical approach, the latter part of the mission will simply be ignored.

As it is, the educational system emphasizes good citizenship during the early stages of formation and postpones any potential subversion until the postgraduate level. Speculation and imagination are allowed only after becoming a good citizen. In order for actual subversion to take place, it would first have to address the earlier parts of the educational process. This explains why alphabetization takes place at the beginning of the educational voyage while true art-making is placed at its end, or is indeed postponed until after formal education is over.

The tension that emerges from this built-in stability/instability contradiction creates two main divisions in how education is approached: between “integralism” and “fragmentalism,” on the one hand; and between tutorial education and massive education, on the other. Although the two divisions are not necessarily aligned with each other, in traditional education, fragmentation tends to be coupled with massive education. Here information is reified, classified into disciplines, and simultaneously transmitted to large groups of people with the aim of achieving an efficient conformist stability. Knowledge travels from the outside to the inside. The elements are distinct, and their classification and order are presumed to be good and unchangeable. Power lies in the hands of somebody other than the student.

The second alignment is different. In more progressive education practices, integralism tends to be associated with a tutorial style of instruction in which there is more room for interdisciplinary research, encouragement of discovery, and an emphasis on individual processing. While not necessarily seeking either a flexible society or a critical analysis of one’s

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connections to it, there is at the very least this emphasis on individuation. And inasmuch as it includes the possibility of a permanent critique, there is an empowerment of the individual in the form of an encouraged, self-aware perception of the world.

It is this notion of empowerment that creates ideological differences between the two alignments. As soon as empowerment is introduced, the politics around the distribution of power becomes an indissoluble part of the educational process. This can explain why the most paradigmatic pedagogical figures in Latin America sought to develop not only the basic process of alphabetization within the field of education, but also self- and social awareness. Both the Venezuelan Simón Rodríguez (1769–1854) and the Brazilian Paulo Freire (1921–1997) saw education as a form of building a progressive and just social community. In the 1820s, Rodríguez declared that education had to deal “first with things, and second with those who own them.”02 In the 1960s, Freire wrote that “before learning how to read words, one should learn how to read the world.”03 Both educators underlined the importance of decoding the social situation prior to decoding the disciplines of reading and writing.

It is not surprising that this form of social decoding is easier to achieve through individual exchanges rather than collective ones. Individual tutoring seems to be ideal. When the teacher can focus all his or her energy and attention on one person, it allows for immediate calibration and response to the most minimal signs of incomprehension. Done well, it takes the Socratic method to the level of extreme psychological therapy, making for a tailor-made education for each individual. If the teacher is a good one, this makes for perfection. Seen in terms of efficiency, however, individual tutoring is the least economical strategy. It is no coincidence that having a personal tutor is a symbol of wealth reserved for the upper classes, so it becomes paradoxical to expect this highly elitist mechanism to also be the most appropriate means of achieving a just and classless society.

On the other hand, massive education remains seductive for its apparent economic efficiency as well as its populist appeal. A teacher can form tens or hundreds of individuals with the same investment of time and energy that a tutor makes for one. As far as the empowerment of the individual is concerned, however, massive education has the tendency to disseminate information and indoctrinate rather than to promote investigation and self-consciousness. In other words, striving for efficiency favors cheap output at the expense of qualitative evaluation. Quality becomes assessed within an economic frame of reference. Alarmingly, this distortion is accepted as the norm. Of course, there are tutors who inform and indoctrinate their students, just as there are teachers educating the masses who are able to raise awareness and empower them. In the first case, however, the tutor is betraying the teaching mission; in the second, the ideals are only reached by overcoming built-in obstacles.

img 02 My mother’s pen.

02 Simón Rodríguez, Obras Completas (Caracas: Ediciones del Congreso de la República, 1988), 1:356.

03 Later, Freire would rephrase this by saying: “To read a word and to learn to write it to then read it are a consequence of learning the writing of reality, of having had the experience of feeling reality and modifying it”. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Alfabetización: Lectura de la palabra y lectura de la realidad (Barcelona: Paidós, 1989), 67.

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Coding and Decoding How and What Sixty-five years ago, when I was learning how to write, I was forced to fill pages with the same letter, repeating it over and over again. I had to copy single letters before I was allowed to write words. I was given words before I could express other people’s ideas, before I could express my own ideas, before I could even explore what my own ideas might be. It only occurred to me as an adult that, if I know how to write with a pencil, I also know how to draw with that pencil.04 For my mother, educated in the Germany of World War I, matters were even worse.

She had to use a pen designed specially—not for writing—but for learning how to write.

The pen looked as if it had been designed for torture. Oval pieces of sharp tin forced the placement of the fingers into one particular position. If the fingers were not in the required position, they would be hurt. One could speculate that these pens were instrumental in preparing for Nazi Germany’s ethos of obedience.

Art education has always been faced with a confusion between art and craft: in teaching how to do things, one often neglects the more important question of what to do with them. The conventional way of teaching how to write concentrates on readability and spelling, which only addresses the how of writing without regard to the what. Exemplified by the practice of teaching someone how to write by concentrating on a frozen aesthetic feature such as calligraphy, this approach fails to first identify the need for a message, which would then open an approach to writing that concerns the structure and clarity of what is being written.

In an exaggerated form, the pen synthesizes everything I hated about my education: the fragmentation of knowledge into airtight compartments, the confusion between how-to-do and what-to-do, the development of communication without first establishing the need for it. It was like learning how to cook without first being hungry—without even identifying what hunger is. After all, education is less about being hungry than about awakening appetite to create the need for consumption. In fact, I believe that this is how cooking is taught.

Why can’t one first identify and explore the need to communicate in order to then find a proper way of communicating? Languages themselves are generated in this manner, and this is how they evolve. Words are created to designate things that had hitherto been either unknown or unnamable. Today’s spelling errors determine tomorrow’s writing. Many of those errors are the simple product of an oral decoding that overlays written coding. Of course, errors should be acknowledged—but they should also be subject to critical evaluation. As a derogatory term, “error” reflects a particular code-centrism typical of our culture.

Illiteracy is, after all, only a problem within a literacy-based culture. In general, codes are created by a need to translate a message into signs, and then decoded by a need to decipher the message. Through this coding and decoding, there is a process of feedback in which “improper” or misplaced codings produce evocations that change or enrich the message.

04 In fact John Gadsby Chapman had already proclaimed that “Anybody who can learn to write can learn to draw” in the first lines of his The American Drawing-Book (New York: J.S. Redfield, 1847), as quoted by Arthur D. Efland in his History of Art Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1990).

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Finding Discovery When the reason to read and write is primarily to receive and give orders, it is understandable that the need for learning should not be identified by the person to be alphabetized, but by the same power structure that produces those needs. Knowledge becomes predetermined and closed when both definition and identification are performed within this restricted functional field, while a more open field would stimulate questioning and creation. In essence, one cannot educate properly without revealing the power structure within which education takes place. Without an awareness of this structure and the way it distributes power, indoctrination necessarily usurps the place of education.

While this is true for education in general, it becomes more insidious when applied to the teaching of reading and writing. In this case, indoctrination is not necessarily visible in the content, but instead seeps heavily into the process of transmission: if one is taught to repeat like a parrot, it doesn’t really matter what is actually being repeated; only the desired automatic, internalized act of repetition will remain. If we only teach to recognize things by their forms without addressing concepts, it won’t matter what generates these forms. Only the recognition of the packaging will remain, and worse, the acquisition of knowledge will stop there.

A real education for an artist consists of preparation for a pure research of the unknown. In a strong art education, this starts at the very beginning. But as institutional education in other areas is organized to convey only known information and to perpetuate conventional habits, these are two pedagogies in fundamental conflict. Where, then, should the fight against illiteracy be placed? Should alphabetization be handled as a subject for training or as a tool for discovery?

The question may be too schematic. In art, pure discovery leads to amateurism, while pure training leads to empty professionalism—good preparation ultimately seeks a balance between them. The question does not concern which activity should be eliminated, but rather which one should inform the other. Those in favor of training often defend it with the need to supply good scaffolding for the student. Yet if one ultimately hopes that discovery will be the main purpose of a student’s life, whether for self-realization or for collective enrichment, it is clear that the student should not just learn to build scaffolds.

We now find ourselves in an age when the amount of available knowledge far exceeds our capabilities for codification. The imbalance is such that we must speculate on whether the concept of restricted alphabetization based on the re-presentation of known things may be an unforgivable anachronism. We may have arrived at a point where we need an education that goes far beyond all this: one that first makes the subject aware of the personal need for literacy and then identifies the coding systems already in use, so that they may be used as a reference; one that proceeds to activate translation processes as a primary tool for entering new codes; one that, from the very beginning, fosters the ability to reorder knowledge, to make unexpected connections that present rather than re-present. In other words, we need a pedagogy that includes speculation, analysis, and subversion of conventions, one that addresses literacy in the same way any good art education addresses art. This means putting literacy into the context of art. By forcing art to focus on these things, in turn, the art empire itself will also be enriche

Text courtesy of the author. First published in e-flux Journal #03, 2009. This essay began as a paper presented at the 1st International Meeting on Education, Art and Functional Illiteracy, Rio de Janeiro, 2008.

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#how to escape from the video-surveillance box?

Five possible escape routes (for imprisoned architects)

“I do not think that there is anything that is functionally -by its very nature- absolutely liberating. Liberty is a practice. So there may, in fact, always be a certain number of projects whose aim is to modify some constraints, to loosen, or even to break them, but none of these projects can, simply by its nature, assure that people will have liberty automatically, that it will be established by the project itself. The liberty of men is never assured by the institutions and laws that are intended to guarantee them. This is why almost all of these laws and institutions are quite capable of being turned around. Not because they are ambiguous, but simply because “liberty” is what must be exercised.

The guarantee of freedom is freedom. (…) If one were to find a place where liberty is effectively exercised, one would find that this is not owing to the order of objects, but, once again, owing to the practice of liberty”.

Michel Foucault, ‘Space, Knowledge and Power’.01

Every contemporary prison seems to tend towards an accumulation of video-surveillance boxes, just as every new architecture seems to tend towards an image. Is it possible to escape this?

We could even say more, following the reasoning of Foucault in the same interview that opens this text, when talking about the Familistère de Guise designed by Jean-Baptiste Godin in 1859 and whose architecture ‘was clearly intended for the freedom of people02: ‘the panoptic qualities of Guise could well have allowed it to be used as a prison. Nothing could be simpler’03. In that way, we could say that any average housing building built today, applying the correct security and surveillance technology, could work as a prison.

The prison has undress (and the same could be said of an increasingly flat architecture). The advances of the technique have reduced it to its most essential and sinister state. A space of reclusion, someone/something that watches, and a guarded body. And, when this body works as a ware, generating profits, even better!

What do we have left, for us, dreamers architects? It seems that Foucault, and the history of the technique, has disarmed us.

For now, we can learn from these ‘other spaces’04. Prisons, as heterotopic spaces - a term used by the philosopher to refer to these and other places where the ‘tradition of the oppressed’ can be recognized, reunited, organized, confronted05 - it appears, at the same time ‘’as a great ‘reserve of imagination’, that it belongs to us to use freely”06.

It is this attitude, which we could classify as optimistic, in front of the buildings historically more linked to the human drama, that seeks to make visible what is always hidden, which will allow us to play against the device, to be able to question it. Thus, we will be able, then, to play against the program of the devices within the program itself, or what is the same, make art: (a term that encompasses science, politics and philosophy) produce new unlikely elements, more difficult to be captured by the likely devices. Thus, to oppose the blind game of information and disinformation an antagonistic game, a game capable of bringing new information07.

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01 Michel Foucault, Space, Knowledge, and Power. This interview with Michel Foucault was conducted by Paul Rabinow and translated by Christian Hubert, published in The Foucault Reader, Compilation by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon Books, New York, 1984 02 Ibidem.

03 Ibidem.

img 01 Peter Halley. “Prison and Apartment”. Taken from peterhalley.com

04 Reference to “Des espaces autres”, published by Foucault on 1967.

05 Georges Didi-Huberman, Volver sensible / hacer sensible, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia Editora, 2014.

06 Ibidem.

07 Flusser, Vilém, El universo de las imágenes técnicas. Argentina: Caja Negra, 2015.

08 Meuwissen, Joost ‘1980. Self-Portrait of a Society. Panopticon Prison Arnhem’. Journal for Architecture, #94. OMA. The First Decade (nai010 publishers) 2015. 14-19.

09 Rem Koolhaas, ‘Revision - Study for the renovation of a Panopticon Prison’, in:

It is in this sense, that we present a brief and intentional selection of works and architectural projects linked to the prisoned where five possible ways to escape to the video-surveillance box are glimpsed, five escape routes for imprisoned architects (in architecture).

OMA; Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL, 2nd ed. New York: Monacelli Press, 1998, 235-253.

1. Cut the Eye

10 Op. cit.

img 02 Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou, 1929.

Taken from Youtube.

img 03 OMA. Koepel Panopticon Prison.

Taken from website oma.eu

In 1979, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) was invited to carry out a project for the renovation of the Koepel prison in Arhem, the Netherlands, one of the few panopticons that remains standing. Its modernization planned to extend its operation for another 50 years, in addition to the 100 it already had, incorporating at the same time, contemporary notions of prison treatment.

However, it would seem that more than a simple opportunity for an assignment, there was a possibility to seek new records within the field of architecture and their systems of thought through working with one of the most influential programmatic diagrams of the XVIII and XIX centuries’ disciplinary culture: the panopticon.

In this way, Rem Koolhaas declares: “few parts of society render the self-portrait the prison system does”08.

At the beginning of the presentation of the project in the publication S, M, L, XL of the author, two photograms of the surrealistic short film “Un Chien Andalou” by Luis Buñuel are shown. Clear sample of the conceptual framework within which the proposed architectural operation will move: cut the eye.

What Buñuel is cutting, for Koolhaas’s interest, is Bentham’s own omnipresent eye, his theoretical model of panoptism, and the infinite literature it would produce. All without even mentioning Foucault.

The change of paradigm is evidenced by the new use of space under the dome proposed by the project, the central control post - the eye of the panopticon - becomes the guardians’ canteen: the former observers are now the observed by the prisoners who are not longer exclusively in their cells, but circulates freely in the rings and can access the ground floor. Originally conceived as empty, the entire interior is often as busy as the Milan Gallery. 09 Koolhaas adheres to an urban model jail, that as our society reflection, manifests the public character of the building, projecting it as a space of the political, of the civic and of the socializing. Thus, he affirms that “a ‘modern’ prison architecture would consist of a prospective archeology, constantly projecting new layers of ‘civilization’ over old surveillance systems. The sum of these modifications would reflect the endless evolution of disciplinary systems.” 10 Finally, the cut in the eye has a correlation with the Euclidean space: two streets-tunnels half-buried in the shape of a cross definitively erase the “eye”, and generate, at the same time, spaces for certain programs that are placed at their sides. Then, the barbershop, the meeting rooms, the shops, the bookstore, the free expression room, the kitchen, the health clinic, the gymnasium, the workshops

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and the swimming pool, are located inside and outside the circle, building a programmed floor inside the prison’s perimeter.

“As the only manifestation of novelty inside the Koepel, this intersection offers the residents a way out” 11 says Koolhaas.

Thus, in its description of the project, OMA concludes: “what was surprising, finally, was the almost eager way in which an” architectural “solution was embraced by the authorities as resolving the dilemma of other disciplines. The discredited claim for architecture is being able to directly intervene in the formation of culture - and to achieve through its crystallization, the resolution of hopelessly contradictory demands - freedom and discipline - was for eleven vindicated on the edge of dystopia”.12

11 Op. cit.

12 See project memory at www.oma. eu/projects/1980/koepel-panopticon-prison 13 Kyle May, Julia van den Hout, Jacob Reidel , Archie Lee Coates, Jeff Franklin. Prisons. CLOG (2014) Pag, 14 14 Op. cit.

img 04 OMA. Koepel Panopticon Prison.

Taken from website oma.eu

img 05 Burger, Mario. The Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center,. Taken from medium.com

2. Boats, islands and floating prisons The image of a transatlantic ship on the coast of Hunt Point in New York would look like another ship, one that its citizens are used to seeing in the East River.

White and blue boxes stacked as large containers make up this mass of seven levels high above the sea level. However, stopping the look, we notice that these containers do not go anywhere, they are motionless and the goods inside, turn out not to be objects, but people imprisoned.

This is the Vernon C. Bain Center (VCBC) correctional center known as “the boat”. A prison-ship with 800 spaces used to retain the inmates of the Correctional Department of the city of New York, which was built in 1992 to alleviate the overcrowding of Rikers Island, a neighboring island with a prison complex of 167 hectares, located in front of the VCBC, where more than 11,000 inmates live.

“While the VCBC does not sail anywhere, as far as the United States Coast Guard is concerned, it is definitely a ship, not a building.”13 It is quite clear that this model of jail and its historical background (the French and English have used it in the XVI to XVIII centuries) tells us about the frustrated and contradictory relationship that architecture has maintained with spaces of imprisonment, rejecting prison as building issue, maintaining its condition of denial, isolation and exceptionality, outside the normal area of inhabited space.

The prison ship, therefore, perfectly exposes the tenuous relationship between prisons and what is most valued in architecture: space. If 200 years ago buildings assumed a role that was once left on ships, the VCBC’s resumption of this role exposes the sad failure to improvise the purpose and architectural reality of imprisonment. Like the stacked-container ships that the VCBC looks like, the modern prison is still a storage and retirement space.14 However, there are not only floating prisons that enclose and repress its inhabitants. Crossing the ocean, in Norway, is the island of Bastøy Prison, which

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img 06 Riker’s Island. Taken from Google Images.

img 07 HMS Discovery at Deptford.

Taken from https://goo.gl/FbepLi

15 See project memory at https://dsrny.com/project/does-the-punishment

we could understand as the Scandinavian anti-Alcatraz. It is a minimum security prison located on an island of 2.6 square kilometers where 115 inmates and 69 officials live, of which only 5 remain at night.

In Bastøy the inmates are housed in wooden cottages from which they can freely move around the prison-island. They work on the farm and during their free time they have access to horse riding, fishing, tennis and skiing. Thus, the everyday scenes that occur in it may be found elsewhere. Life goes on quietly, as in any small town in the Nordic landscapes. It seems that the island simply intended to imitate other islands.

3. Seeing, and Not Seeing, Through

img 08 Bastøy Prison Taken from Youtube.

“While architecture’s role in reforming the prison system may be arguable, incarceration is undoubtedly a spatial issue”.15 This is how the memory of the project Does the punishment fit the crime? begins, from the Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) office, an installation designed for the Fondazione Sandretto De Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy. Between art, videogame and architecture, the work invites us to reflect on one of the most significant spatial aspects of imprisonment: the cells.

In this sense, they propose to the visitor to manipulate a touch screen where a table of crimes are classified by their severity and ambiguity. The selected punishment will be reflected through a spatial-temporal matrix: the more severe the crime, the more punitive the space will be. Thus, as the spectator adjusts the reclusion space, the screen shows the design of the resulting cell projected on the walls of the room.

This modification of the possibility of ‘seeing, and not seeing, through’ on base of an criminological scientific qualification of the subjects that inhabit the space for example, between drug use, sexual deviance, insider trading, conspiracy, disturbing the peace, unlawful conduct, illegal immigration, etc., becomes a fresh ironic mockery

img 09 DS+R Does the punishment fit the crime?.

Taken from dsrny.com

img 10 DS+R Does the punishment fit the crime?.

Taken from dsrny.com

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over decades of theories, and architectural practices in relation to criminal matters. Currents of thought about which we can not laugh, but from which to learn, to look through, is an obligation.

16 Forensic Architecture works in Goldsmiths, University of London, under Eyal Weizman’s direction.

17 To see description of the project:

4. Architectural Evidences

forensic-architecture.org/project 18 Barenblit, Ferran. Medina,

Since 2010, works in London an interdisciplinary group of architects, artists, scientists and journalists included under the Forensic Architecture research agency16. From there, they intend to undertake advanced architectural and media research on behalf of international prosecutors, human rights organizations and political and environmental justice groups17. In that way, they work with the production and presentation of ‘architectural evidence’ – buildings and urban environments and their media representations.

Through its multiple projects, this group of, what could be called, “detectives”, or even “vigilantes”, of architecture, uses all the tools that the discipline offers us to take position on urgent issues of the agenda of violence in the world.

An example of this, is their research cases such as “The Grenfell Tower Fire, a half archive and spatial database of the June 14, 2017 fire”, the mexican “The Ayotzinapa Case, a Cartography of Violence”, the case of the “Drone Strikes, investigating covert operations through spatial media in Pakistan”, “ Torture and Detention in Cameroon, the dark side of the US-backed war against Boko Haram” or the project investigating” Saydnaya, Inside a Syrian Torture Prison.”

In the last case, the group of researchers addresses the case of one of the secret prisons of torture that function after the outbreak of the war in Syria. In April 2016, Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture travelled to Istanbul to meet five survivors from Saydnaya Prison, near Damascus. With their help and using architectural and acoustic modeling, the researchers helped witnesses reconstruct the architecture of the prison and their experiences of detention. The former detainees described the cells and other areas of the prison, including stairwells, corridors, moving doors and windows, to an architect working with 3D modeling software. In this way, by collectively reconstructing and succeeding in illuminating the hidden, it is possible to visualize what nobody has been able to see, generating untold architectural evidence in defense of the persecuted.

In their works, architecture and space are understood as an assembly of landscapes of all kinds of data in constant change to stage an observed problem.

Thus, Forensic Architecture demonstrates the possibility that the architectural project operates as a revealer of processes that a priori would be outsiders to it, and at the same time, promotes the expansion of the disciplinary limits in which the practice usually navigates.

This practice of forensic architecture is offered as an eminently pragmatic device.

It acts as an antidote to post-truth: rewriting a place for evidence and understanding that any political operation must be activated both from ideological speculation and through the precise capacity that gives the clarification of the facts. 18

Cuauhtémoc. Una estética libre de estética. https://www.macba.cat/ uploads/20170613/CatalegForensic.0.PDF. Pag. 19

img 11 Forensic Architecture, Bomb Cloud Atlas, 2016, SITUATION#82, SITUATIONS/Fact. Image by Philipp Ottendörfer. Taken from forensicarchitecture.org

img 12 Analysis by Analysis , 2015 Rafah, Palestina. Taken from forensic-architecture.org

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5. Prisioners in the sky

img 13 Saydnaya: Inside a Siryan torture prison. Taken from forensic-architecture.org

Prisons are buildings that nobody wants to see and even less to have as neighbors. As a general rule, contemporary prisons are located on the outskirts of the city, as a placebo of a ‘rehabilitation’ in the solitude of the countryside, seeking to protect the perception of public safety. Visualizing our mirror may not be the most convenient at times.

But what happens when prisons mix with cities? What are the potentialities of a usually marginal program in an urban setting?

In the 1970s, Metropolitan Correctional Centers (MCCs) were the emblematic architectures of a new penitentiary and judicial system plan in the United States.

In this framework, Chicago, New York and San Diego would build prisons in the deteriorated areas of their urban centers, close to the federal courts for prisoners of short sentences, thus reducing costs and times of transfers.

Adopting a cloak of invisibility to disguise the function of the building, the MCC of Chicago is located within the Loop of the pioneer city in the typology of the skyscraper. The monumentality of this tower as the embodiment of crime seems to make an effort to give civic weight to the always marginalized.

img 14 Rog, Enga. Metropolitan Correctional Center, Chicago. Taken from Flickr

img 15 Metropolitan Correctional Center, Chicago. Taken from Google Images

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In the city of Mies - creator of the glass tower - the building projected by the architect Weese rises defiantly like an essay in which the opacity is embraced where others celebrate the transparent. 19 The construction vertically piles up diverse uses, resulting in what we might call a corrective mix use. A first section of activities in relation to the external environment, is interrupted by a technical floor for mechanical installations, to then start a second section, where the cells are located.

Finally, the tower is finished off in the sky with the courtyard for the inmates. A liberating and contradictory gesture, since prisons, by definition, can not think of themselves in terms of freedom. In this way, the prisoners are elevated to heaven, placed where, probably, they could never be, at the height of any skyscraper in the center.

Thus, this courtyard of the prisoners in the Chicago sky, which claims equality and the right to the city, seems to be related to the pool of the building of the ‘SESC 24 de Maio’ by Paulo Mendes da Rocha and MMBB in São Paulo, Brazil.

In this other case, the genius of the authors has managed to place an unexpected space for recreation and enjoyment, accessible to all the visiting public, in the heights of São Paulo center. Thus, those below can ascend, they can look at the city from above to belong, participate and, finally, be part of it.

A particular fact, and certainly incredible, is that Harry Weese, the same architect who designed the MCC in Chicago, built, a few blocks from the prison and a decade later, the Swissotel Chicago tower. This, with its typology of tower with triangular floor and prismatic base, is extremely similar to the one designed to house prisoners. Thus, finally, with this ironic similarity between two models of prison and hotel that history offers us, it is perhaps demonstrated what at the beginning of this text Foucault told us.

img 16 Hecker, David. Metropolitan Correctional Center, Chicago. Taken from Flickr.

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19 Kyle May, Julia van den Hout, Jacob Reidel , Archie Lee Coates, Jeff Franklin. Prisons. CLOG (2014) Pag, 30

img 17 Penner, Andre.

Visitors swim in a rooftop pool at Sesc 24 de Maio. Taken from apimagesblog.com

img 18 Swissotel Chicago. Taken from Google Images.

Undoubtedly, our prisons at Punta de Rieles could appear on this list, or at least one of them (the one that the reader considers he can learn more from).

Prisons as heterotopic self-portraits of the societies that construct them challenge, not only the society itself, but also the established discourse of the architecture that constitutes it, they put into crisis the ways of understanding and producing it, and they make a warning call to the objectives that it pursues.

But let’s not forget, architecture can be the celebration of life and should be, also, in the less expected places. ;)

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Mauricio Wood

Jimena RĂ­os

Diego Morera

Federico Colom

Sergio Aldama

Montevideo, Uruguay / 2018