Preamble Narratives and Social Memory - Universidade do Minho

Drawings and Narrative: the Inmates Memory and Experience (At the Prison of Monsanto)Mariana Carrolobody of knowledge, revealed through the revelation of the inmates’ spatial conditions andinterpersonal relationships, that conducts to a reflection upon the idea of narrative identity?What sort of records and memories are contained in this kind of work, as the witnessesof an unpaired experience; and what information, symbols and identity marks related to thesubject and the place can this show us?The underlying idea of this works, as an artistic witness – both as a product and aproducer of the individual and social knowledge of the place, derived from these speeches– is that it tells specific stories and has visualities and encrypted metaphors of a certainexperience and life-experience. This work has an individual and a collective dimension,shared and complex, fruit of the limiting prison action towards rights, freedom, behavioursand autonomy of the inmates – ritual social experiences, disciplinary and submitted to theexercise of power (Foucault, 2007). They are, therefore, based on a discourse that is eminentlyfocused on a personal perception of space and shape, and on the way it is represented bythe inmates, considering the conjecture and exercise of the microphysics of power (Foucault,2007) and the dialectics of knowledge production.This way, with this research, one aims to think about the perception of the space, of theshape and of the inmates’ life experiences, as well as their ability to represent a prison facilitywhere inmates live, as a complex phenomenon, common to different grounds; and wherethe Art is a way of mediation and an agent of the revelation: the interpretation and thinkingof all the work that was done. Within this context, one is forced to think about workingmethods that interdisciplinary intersect different knowledge, capable of finding a balancebetween History, Architecture, Space Psychology (among others) and the inmates’ narratives,their perception and memory as a re(construction) and representation of the space and theplace. And allowing oneself, from that experience, to understand the cultural, the social andthe historical factors associated with it, as well as the physical and psychological factorsthat, in real time, constitute not only the concept of place, but also the concept of inmatesand of social body.1. The SpaceThe concept of space and place, and their physical, social and identitarian characteristics,emerges as central during this research. The object of study, the Prison of Monsanto 2 ,the only high-security facility in Portugal, presents a radial plan and is destined solely tomale inmates in a special regime and in punishment - A prison with unique disciplinarycharacteristics and regulations. During its design, the architectural project (1878/1914) wasnot supposed to be used as a civil prison (1915). Nevertheless, as a military building, italready had some formal, proper, symbolic, material and architectonical characteristics ableto be adapted in order to shape it into the Civil Prison of Lisbon. As a building – a circularstronghold – it spontaneously follows part of the J. Bentham’s Panopticon guidelinesand model 3 (1748-1832), which aims: ‘(…) to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and2Former Sá da Bandeira Fortress, that belonged to the Trench Camp in Lisbon. The Civil Prison of Monsanto was created bythe Law of June 30th 1941. The Prison of Monsanto started its functions in 1915 (after the 1st World War), being upgradedto a high-security Prison since 2007.3For a functional description of the Panopticon, see Bentham, 2008 [1787], pp. 20 – 21. On the other hand Foucault understandingof the Panopticon is: ‘But the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of aNarratives and social memory: theoretical and methodological approaches299