Day 19 features Yusuke Kazama, Co-representative Director of Prison Arts Connections, who develops art projects that connect the inside and outside of prisons.
In Block C of the Nara Prison Museum, themed Prison and Art, we have established rooms to exhibit artwork created by people in prison and a space for visitors to write messages to the artists. In the messaging room, visitors can share comments on the artwork or their impressions of the museum, which we will later deliver to the prisons. The goal is to create interaction between those inside and outside the walls. Prison Arts Connections has held three Prison Art Exhibitions, delivering visitor feedback to the artists. This work reminds us of the simple truth that people in prison are human beings just like us, already living together in the same society. Engaging with their expression reveals that each person has a unique life beyond the label of inmate. Art provides an opportunity to reopen oneself to society from a closed environment. I hope the messages you send in response to these expressions lead to a society focused on recovery rather than a cycle of violence. No one is free until we are all free!
Yusuke Kazama shares the inspiration behind his work: I was deeply moved when I encountered the handwritten notebooks of Norio Nagayama, a death row inmate known as a prison author. At university, I studied how art can co-create with society, based on the belief that art belongs to everyone. Encountering Nagayama’s notebooks led me to explore what art could achieve alongside those behind unseen walls. After studying art management at Tokyo University of the Arts, Kazama now serves as a lecturer at the Faculty of Regional Design, Nara Prefectural University. My move to Nara was a coincidence unrelated to Nara Prison, but I feel it is a special connection, he says.
Follow the series on Instagram: “The Exquisite Prison and the 30”
