This post is also available in: French

Between 2016 and 2018, Maxence Rifflet took photographs in seven French prisons. Avoiding the fascination of the news and the pathos of personal anecdotes, he tries to expose the very mechanism of confinement. During workshops, he shared this experimentation with prisoners: photographing behind these heavy doors, between these thick walls, without reducing the space or crushing the perspectives further, and without the camera creating an additional register of surveillance and paranoia. Together, they observe and document the cramped space devoted to them – this deprivation of space -, sometimes becoming the theater of a fable, sometimes that of a performance. And if Maxence Rifflet’s work brings us back to essential social questions, it deploys in the space of the GwinZegal Art Center, in an old prison, unique and experimental forms, between photographs, installations, volumes… the artist pushes us to question the history of this place, the coherence and acuity of its heritage rehabilitation, and our impunity to roam freely.