the street is our gallery

At the start of 2021, David’s experience within the prison system led to an invitation from Gabriella Cianciolo, professor at the University of Cologne, to participate as a speaker in an interdisciplinary project named GAP, for “Graffiti Art in Prison”.
With enthusiasm, he accepted but suggested they could take it a step further by conducting a workshop with inmates in the Florence Sollicciano jail. Like many penitentiaries around the world, Sollicciano prison is relegated to an amorphous periphery in-between two municipalities, Florence and Scandicci.

A place separated from the rest of the city and deliberately forgotten like those who are left behind its walls. Same time, he just had met with renowned New York-based photographer Martha Cooper in a train yard while he was painting graffiti so he proposed her to join them to document the entire process within the jail from 2022 to 2023. With Martha teamed up for an entire year to give the best chance to the project and keep the promise they made to the participants.

With workshop participants 3d scans volunteer inmates with the idea of using those scans to sculpt them later. Surprised by the respectful relation that existed between some guards and inmates David decided to include a few in the process and also scanned with them. After discussions and long negotiations with the jail administration, he finally obtained the permission to create two large scale installations on the jail fence at two different moments of the year. The artist chose to portrait the two most discreet participants, a police woman and an inmate, not telling the public who was who. They are first individuals living this unusual place.

Despite numerous attempts by the jail’s police commander to cancel the installations, they never gave up and managed to set them up in time. The second moment was the creation of murals, 3 murals were done by inmatess with total freedom then i completed 9 murals with the idea to paint portraits and sentences taken both from guards and inmates without revealing who is who or who said what in order to deconstruct first my own clichés and sametime pacify what could be.

This immersion became a beautiful human adventure, during which they conducted workshops and murals with Martha, the inmates and somes students from GAP project that helped them with the inmates murals.

Pictures taken by Martha Cooper are the only remaining trace of this monumental but ephemeral project and this is also what makes them precious. They are the witness to a moment when fences were crossed and differences erased.