Routes of Escape [Vie di fuga].

ROUTES OF ESCAPE Research. Suicide in Italian prisons is a phenomenon that has taken on genuine epidemic characteristics. "Morire di Carcere" is a dossier created by the "Ristretti Orizzonti" association that brings out a dramatic and disconcerting reality, but, at the same time, one that we feel too far away, so much beyond our threshold of perception (or what we decide to perceive) not to touch us either. 123 deaths, 52 suicides, 1135 suicide attempts in the year 2017. The data show an increase in the suicide rate from 8.3% in 2008 (year of entry into force of the reform of penitentiary healthcare) to 9.1 of 2017. At September 6, the suicides registered for the year 2018 are 42. Project: "Escape routes" [Rooms. Photographs beyond the threshold]. There is no prison capable of confining my imagination, there are no bars able to prevent my mind from flying (or to my body to fall). Physical rooms, mental rooms, real and imaginary perimeters still able to confine, to constitute a closed space and to delimit another one that becomes external, unknown or unrecognizable. Physical barriers designed to represent a clear boundary between the righteous and those who are no longer so, or, perhaps, have never been; miserable containers of faults and their perpetrators, sometimes only presumed so. Rooms from which you can not decide to go out, that become oppressive cages, growing more overwhelming every day and with thresholds that can only be crossed when the system decides that the container can be reopened and its contents allowed out, or when one of those existences withheld ceases to live, too often by choice, demonstrating that in life there can be greater evils than death. "Vie di fuga" is a project set in my mind even before that in the former prison of Santa Tecla, in Sanremo, now location of the Liguria Regional Museum Pole. The intent is not to express a personal judgment on the legitimacy of a system that has repeatedly demonstrated the inability to re-educate, but to reflect on what can materialize in the mind of those forced to inhabit these places. Individuals often alienated and in the thrall of themselves, their pains, their fears, their faults and their nightmares that, in these confined spaces, become strong to the point of coming alive and sometimes even taking their lives. Since the body is forced to remain immobile for a long time, imprisoned, the mind travels without rest, without worrying about safe trajectories but exploring distant routes, undermining the limits between the real and the imagined, sometimes representing a precious opportunity for psychic escape, at other times pushing into an abyss from which there is no return. The "syndrome of imprisonment" is the mental process in which the individual is devoured by a reality so new and so annihilating that doesn't leave any possibility of escape. Each subject thus puts into action, more or less consciously, a series of behaviors denying the same process, ending up isolating oneself and finding shelter in a silent solitude or projecting to an imaginary world that can protect one's mind from that hostile, foreign and violent environment. From this extreme attempt at denial comes an individualistic and visceral journey in which the walls of stone break down, fragment and finally end up demolished to finally return to a glimpse of light. A faint reflection brought by a memory that provides an extreme, ephemeral way of salvation, the last opportunity to glimpse, as if in a mirage, a shred of an old life that will no longer be. Then the mirage begins to fade away and the process of "depersonalization" suddenly distorts that veil built to protect oneself, and here the reassuring images begin to change into darkest disturbing nightmares. The rooms go back to tighten over tired bodies and over those now corrupt minds. There is no longer any threshold to cross, despair erases every trace of an alternative and only a single route of escape seems viable. Emanuele Faccio Gofas "There are many ways to kill. You can stab them in the stomach, take away their bread, not heal their illness, stuck them in an uninhabitable house, slaughter them at work, push them to suicide, make them go to war, and so on. Only a few of these ways are prohibited in our state ". [B. Brecht].