Mathieu Pernot

The Prison de la Santé, built in 1867 in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, has known many famous prisoners, like the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1911) or the gangster Jacques Mesrine, who escaped in 1978. But it is not this story that Mathieu Pernot sought to grasp when he photographed the destruction of the remand centre in 2015. In this patrimonial building, the artist looked to understand how prison, the place of isolation and constraints, produces specific forms and ideas. From this enclosed world, the inmates make an outside one exist that they inscribe in the inside of their cell. Basing himself on the multiple layers of daily life, Mathieu Pernot took stock, photographed and collected in a systematic manner the traces left on the walls by inmates over the years, before their definite disappearance. The photographs stemming from this documentary work, assembled into series, show deserted and disembowelled buildings, open doors and empty cells. By underlining their absence, they make paradoxically visible the life of the inmates to a society that couldn’t see them. By making his photographs dialogue with inscriptions and images taken from the walls, Mathieu Pernot tells the story of this inside life with different voices.