Art in prison: a new perspective for inmates

"The thread of my story" was the title of this year's project as part of the "Kultur am Prisong" (culture in prison) initiative. For a fortnight, once in July and once in September, artist Cristina Picco met with four inmates from Section F of the prison in Schrassig. The workshops were all about sewing and embroidery, because as the name suggests, each of the prisoners was allowed to tell their very own story.

These were like an unusual splash of colour in the grey of the prison, which tries to bring a touch of the outside world inside Schrassig through projects like this. "When I arrived, I had a precise plan and a concept in my head. But I quickly realised that the participants wanted to express themselves, without any guidelines or frameworks, so we dedicated ourselves to wild embroidery, " says workshop leader Picco, explaining her first impression. The multimodal artist had been planning to carry out a project in prison for a long time, because for her, thread is like a script that adapts itself to the hand that holds it.

Like a holiday for the mind and soul

"I love using techniques between art and craft that are considered popular to convey culture and art. But without art being this fancy thing with a capital letter, not 'Art' but simply 'art', " says the artist. She is fascinated by bringing art to places where it is not expected, where it actually has no place. "Art is freedom, the opening of the mind, so where better to share art with others than in prison." After Picco had distributed her material on the tables, laid out some pictures as inspiration and shown the various techniques, everyone was allowed to work on whatever they felt like – and they did.

From yellow bees and colourful T-shirts to dinosaurs, the finished embroideries were as varied as their sewers, who described the workshops as a holiday. "I like to be creative and love working with my hands. I do handicrafts in the cell, it's a good way to balance out prison life and just relax, " says Tatiana, one of the participants. Art is like therapy for her and replaces her meditation, which she can't do in Schrassig: "I'm actually a very spiritual person, if I were a man I'd be a monk and not in prison. Unfortunately, we're not allowed to put on headphones with our own playlist in here, we have to listen to the radio and all the traffic information is annoying. So I prefer to sew, it's good for me."