Celltexts

Ines and Eyal Weizman have a fascinating new web installation entitled “CELLTEXTS“:

The installation is dedicated to prisoners engaged in writing. The work is organized around a collection of hundreds of books and other texts from across the world written under conditions of enforced incarceration. The collection includes the work of writers who have been sent to prison for the contents of their writing, for their political involvement, as well as of prisoners convicted of other crimes who have used the time and seclusion of their incarceration to become writers. Through the collection of texts an archipelago of prison cells emerges. The cells are thus revealed as sites of intellectual production, marking the limit condition of writing. The collection is assembled in recognition that spatial confinement and isolation may induce a process of creative, imaginative, sometimes spiritual, cultural production.

The website is elegant in its austerity and beautifully spare, which is, of course, appropriate to its subject. The index of authors, is impressive; each is represented by an interactive bar in the graphic. Interesting how we forget some of these facts of books we take for granted in our reading of them.