Melanie Veuillet
Tools of Disobedience
- PhotographerMelanie Veuillet
PETER FUNCH Have you ever considered the power of creativity in the lives of prisoners? In Tools of Disobedience, Swiss photographer Melanie Veuillet explores this question by looking at the knife, pipes, various tools, maps and other objects that are manufactured through the creativity of prisoners who are under surveillance and in confined spaces. It is the creative mind which has produced these objects. The book reveals how vivid the mind becomes when restricted by space, but also touches on the prisoners’ survival instinct and how human needs ultimately prevail.
Tools of Disobedience, 2014
Tools of Disobedience presents 185 photographs shot in 2014 at prisons in Romandy, the French-speaking part of Switzerland. They show items which the inmates made secretly in their cells using the crudest of tools and materials – and which were subsequently confiscated. They are, for the most part, functional replicas of objects we use in our day-to-day lives outside the prison walls. They testify to the extraordinary skill and inventiveness required to make anything at all in these special, adverse conditions of privation and manifold constraints, with narrow confines, cheap materials, a lack of tools, constant surveillance and the need to conceal these creations.
The available materials are altered, combined and repurposed, thereby losing their original function to become something new, endowed with new properties. The objects often look simpler and more essential than their “normal” counterparts; while they are often quite different, they are always functional. All the objects were photographed on location and in the style of archival material. Under the neutral artificial lighting, they look like industrial products photographed for advertising purposes. In their hybrid nature, these objects form a sort of page-by-page visual lexicon of peculiar and yet familiar, profound and highly subjective forms.
