“Project for abandoned prison” is an intervention project developed in the former Valencia model prison between July and October 2008, which aims to record and document the report printed on the walls of this historic prison, uninhabited since 1992 and currently being renovated. From this starting point, the project proposes the intervention inside the building before its disappearance, to find traces of the place through the physical record of its walls and cells, and preserving them for the future as the supporting media for the thoughts of those who lived there.

 

 

The material extracted from the interventions in prison, primarily consists of a series of prints (boots from the walls) on canvas of various sizes, equivalent to the actual size of the walls prints. In addition to the pieces on canvas, the project is completed with a parallel and artistic documentary photography, and three pieces of digital video filmed by the authors within the prison during the intervention process in the cells.

 

Through the encounter with the material presence of the fragments recovered from the walls, and audiovisual and photographic documentation, this exhibition offers the viewer the opportunity to approach the physical and symbolic reality of the inhabited prison space, and at the same time to be a participant in the act of recovering its memory. In this sense, this exhibition is also the possibility of producing a game that will finally lead to a reflection on the issues over time, the need to retain and how to deal with the inevitable disappearance of everything that becomes temporary.