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. AUTHOR: Laurence Rasti, born in 1990, graduated as a photographer and visual artist from ECAL in Lausanne and HEAD ? Genève. Her work focuses mainly on Switzerland, where she researches restrictive migration policies and their instruments of control. She also teaches in the photography program at EDHEA in Sion, Switzerland. SELLING POINTS: . Features a collaborative artistic investigation of a prison environment, to which the portrayed inmates also contributed themselves . Offers a deeper understanding of who is imprisoned in Switzerland and for what reason . The topic of prison and imprisonment, between social taboo and the challenges of documenting a closed environment, is often neglected yet at the same time of major social significance . Laurence Rasti's previous book There Are No Homosexuals in Iran (2017) gained wide attention 100 colour illustrations
