Part of us

Even today, the prison is a world apart from the city in which it stands. During the meeting with journalists on Christmas Eve, Cardinal Roberto Repole told how children had represented with a drawing all the realities present in the city of Turin, all except the prison.

So the action of the Holy See on the occasion of the Jubilee to bring contemporary art inside the prison as a challenge of hope opens up new opportunities. In various prisons in Italy and around the world, some "Doors of Hope" will be symbolically opened, installations entrusted to internationally renowned artists who, in collaboration with the prison communities, will create these works to be placed outside the prison walls, visible in this way to the city.

The aim of the project is to encourage and support experiences of prisoners aimed at living their stay in prison in a rehabilitative way, preparing for their return to society. In addition to the conversion of the spiritual and cultural gaze of the heart and thought of society on the subject, prison must increasingly be considered as a place of rehabilitation and not just punishment. In his opening speech at the press conference to present the project Contemporary art in prison: the challenge of hope, Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, Prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See, insisted that: «The problem of prison does not belong only to States, the entire human and civil community is called to make it its own, is called to intercept this reality usually only imagined and to take more interest.

With this project we want to bring the theme of prisons and prisoners back to the center of the city and of the debate. And here the artistic experience can play a decisive role, because art knows it is a bridge and connects with renewed and creative intensity the interrupted paths of existence. Bringing art into prison institutions, as already achieved in Giudecca, gives life to an extraordinary work in the constitutional sense of art. 27». Like, for example, the work of the artist Marinella Senatore in Rebibbia, (inaugurated last December 26, the day on which Pope Francis opened the Holy Door in the Roman prison) which offers a participatory artistic activity, in which «the detained population is called once again not to be a passive subject of a cultural intervention, but an active subject».


Chiara Genisio
NP January 2025