Swiss artist Laurence Rasti has immersed herself with the inmates of a prison in the Swiss Canton of Neuchâtel. 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.