Laurence Rasti - Wall as Horizon

Laurence Rasti’s meditation on the lives of detainees at La Promenade penitentiary in Switzerland through photographs.

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 characterized by precarity and exile. In conversation with detainees A., G., L., M., N., N., T., and Z.; curator and art historian Federica Martini; and migration researcher Luca Gnaedeinger, she questions a concept of imprisonment seemingly intended to punish 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. Her book 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.

Laurence Rasti teaches in the photography program at EDHEA in Sion, Switzerland.