The exhibition L’œilleton inversé, la prison et ses bleus is built on a historic turning point for French prisons. Dilapidated and unfit for habitation, many of them have closed in recent years leaving in the past an ancient model on its last legs but still a working in our imagination: that of a panoptic prison inserted into our cities. The transfer of prisoners to new prisons built outside the cities is a time of disruption involving all of the players: detainees, prison staff, partners and families, in a paradoxical breaking-up. That of abandoning a place of incarceration which was hard but known and reassuring, a workplace controlled, even familial. The last moments of this life would have been disruptive, violent and touching.
The photographs are sequences from an immersion into the penal culture, mixing fragments of confinement and times of training. They encounter real-life stories, places, paths crossed and the scenarios of the prison staff questioning my relationship with this imaginary prison and the faces of those who organise it. As if the peephole has been reversed, the observer discovers the stories of those seen as the executioners, who learn to observe while being watched at every turn, sometimes confronted with reversals of view, heights of humanity, their own fears and doubts, that my artistic process lays bare whereas it is customary to restrain and to hide these things.
The exhibition is divided into several periods inviting the spectator on a reflexive course through the prison world. One of the issues is to find a distance that doesn’t put the observer in the position of being a voyeur.
Arnaud Théval
Arnaud Théval, L’œilleton inversé, la prison vidée et ses bleus
From 24th June to 30th November 2017
Musée d’Agen – Eglise des Jacobins
Place du Docteur Esquirol
47000 Agen
France
