Embodied Art in the Context of Imprisonment

Abstract

The act of drawing or engraving the walls, as the first form of artistic expression of the Homo Sapiens attested, opens a reflection that calls into play cognitive archaeology that, together with the historical and anthropological aspects, looks at the embodied dimension of this specific aesthetic experience. The same applies to graffiti and wall drawings made in prison contexts. According to Michele Cometa’s studies on the exonerating and compensating function of art in the evolution of Homo Sapiens, it seems that men in the act of painting and engraving has tried to give meaning to their experience, compensating for their impotence, due to instinctual deficits, and granting themselves a respite from reality and the continuous struggle for survival, through artification, fiction and the use of external memories. This article intends to deepen the bodily and cognitive dimensions of the act of making graffiti and wall drawings in contexts of imprisonment, through the theories of Vittorio Gallese on the embodied simulation and the liberated embodied simulation, in which the same simulation made possible by mirror neurons, is freed from the weight of our presence in the real world, involving the process of the re-elaboration of memory and imagination. From this perspective, graffiti made in a prison can be studied as a response of prisoners to a specific environment, in an attempt to give meaning to their presence in that place or, sometimes, to detach from it.