Abstract

CHAMOND, Jeanine; BLOC, Lucas Guimarães  and  CAVALCANTI, Virginia de Saboia Moreira. The criative process in prison: a new élan for existence?. Rev. Subj. [online]. 2017, vol.17, n.1, pp. 12-21. ISSN 2359-0769.  http://dx.doi.org/10.5020/23590777.rs.v17i1.5894.

How to be creative in a prison's hellish environment? Based on the French experience, we advocate the importance of the creative process in prison by means of 7 points: 1. Creativity is a means of survival, which aims at escaping psychological damage and at mentally processing the imprisonment experience. 2. Creativity is conducive to spiritual evasion and allows for the opening of a small space of personal freedom in order to resist infantilizing effects, and brutality, as well as expanding horizons during deadly prison time. 3. The creative process serves the purpose of exorcizing anger, revengefulness, violence, fear and, also, it has a cathartic effect on one's destructive instinct, which prevents such instinct from harming oneself and others. 4. The work of figuration, disfiguration, and reconfiguration of artistic matter reflects one's own expression and impression, that is, the movements of self-transformation as an inmate is forced to change in order to survive and not go mad due to their new confined condition. 5. An artist who starts creating might turn into a role model, a disseminator, and a precious basis. This introduction into the art world brings out a rescue of esthetic emotions, which are connected to human community. 6. In collective creativity, forced coexistence, and promiscuity, which sometimes can be violent, might turn the creative process into a collective adventure that restores the senses of community as well as fraternity. 7. One's own reconstruction is obtained only by means of confronting one's own inner prison: chaos, unhappiness, the unspeakable, repetition, childhood drama, etc, in order to get those elements symbolized and transformed. Thus, the creative process, when rigorous, might produce redemption, beauty, self-possession and a new dignity for an inmate living in circumstances in which such person is particularly deprived of all those things.

Keywords : creativity; prison; existence.

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