On 19 April 2022, LIAF – Lofoten International Art Festival unveiled a permanent communal installation by artist Pauline Curnier Jardin (Marseille, France 1980) realised in collaboration with the inmates of the Casa di Reclusione Femminile della Giudecca, an Italian women’s prison located in the former monastery of the Convertite.

Reversing institutional hierarchies, the inmates have briefed and commissioned Curnier Jardin to reshape the interior of the parlour of the prison, and to create a new film. Adoration, the film developed through collective script writing and the animation of the inmates’ drawings and self-portrait pictures, was premiered on the big screen of the permanent installation in the parlour of the prison. It will then travel to Centraal Museum Utrecht, which coproduced the piece, and LIAF2022, which will open in Kabelvåg on September the 3rd, 2022.

The redecoration of the parlour has been inspired by Black Narcissus, a 1947 British psychological drama revolving around the growing tensions and desires within a small convent of Anglican nuns who are trying to establish a school in the old palace of an Indian Raja at the top of an isolated mountain in the Himalayas.

Curnier Jardin’s project thus reveals a hidden history related to the Venetian monastery. Recent research shows that the parlour of the religious institution was used as a theatrical stage by the nuns who occasionally performed in front of their family members and Venetian authorities. Such carnival-like performances allowed the nuns to wear profane clothes and to suspend the social rules that forced them into a monastic life.

Film installation by Pauline Curnier Jardin
Commissioned and curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi