Marking Space. The Wall as Heterotopic Place

According to Michael Foucault, heterotopia is a space ‘other’ than ‘ordinary’, a separate enclosure, delimited within precise boundaries, ‘outside all places and yet locatable’. The prison, the heterotopia par excellence, is an ‘other’ place that is based on the principle of exclusion. This week starts with the concept of heterotopia to deal with spaces (prisons and beyond) and partition walls – subsequently painted, engraved and appropriated through the graphic sign. Prison is a place where violence is real. However, violence is not exercised by individuals or the community, but by the walls themselves, by the architecture, a space designed to control the body and the mind. Art is a way to transform and transcend this environment. In prison, the wall isolates, separates, and oppresses. However, through graffiti, it can become the exact opposite, the instrument of communication, the element that connects. In this sense, the wall of a prison is also a heterotopia: like the mirror, it hides and reveals, it represents itself and projects the image of those who are reflected in it. In this process of inversion, is it possible to find salvation?

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