Counfa
2012
   
The events that shook Tunisia during the revolution have not spared Tunisian prisons. They were the sad theater of mutinies, fires, escapes and abuses of all kinds. It was after these events that I was allowed to visit and get in touch with prisoners. That was the first time that such authorization was given, so far prisons were a highly secret closed world, one of the pieces of the dictatorial machine.
   “Counfa” in arabic is a distortion of the term convoy. Prisoners use it to refer to their transfer from one prison to another. Like them, I moved through twenty prisons, living this trip as a convoy through time and space, where the agreed landmarks are lost to make way for the greatest paradoxes. To testify this trip, I chose to deliver in bulk images that overlap. What I saw and heard in the prisons I have visited exceeded all what I could have imagined. In there, i went through an intense experience where there was no more outside or inside, nor good or bad, nor time or space but only men and women who have lost much more than their freedom.