Swiss artist Laurence Rasti has immersed herself with the inmates of a prison in the Swiss Canton of Neuchatel. At La Promenade penitentiary in the town of La Chaux-de-Fonds, she encountered lives largely characterised by precarity and exile. In conversation with prisoners, researchers, and scholars, she questions a concept of imprisonment apparently geared towards poverty rather than crime. Rasti's artistic research is based on a collaborative approach in which the inmates themselves also take pictures using pinhole cameras and engage in transcribing interviews.

The focus of Rasti's photographic investigation is on the people deprived of their freedom. It reflects on the correlation of prison, precarity, and migration: topics that, in the case of a prison like La Promenade, are closely linked and of great social significance.

Text in English and French.

About the Author

Laurence Rasti, born in 1990, graduated as a photographer and visual artist from ECAL in Lausanne and HEAD - Geneve. Her work focuses mainly on Switzerland, where she researches restrictive migration policies and their instruments of control. She also teaches in the photography program at EDHEA in Sion, Switzerland.

Book Information
ISBN 9783858818942
Author Laurence Rasti
Format Hardback
Page Count 152
Imprint Scheidegger und Spiess AG, Verlag
Publisher Scheidegger und Spiess AG, Verlag