Interview between Kaisa and Anna:
1. How does prison isolate a person from the rest of society?
American prisons are usually located in very remote areas, which are not generally seen by the rest of society. The architecture is low to the ground and the neutral colors almost make them camouflage to their surroundings.
I guess the principle is “out of sight out of mind”. At my brother’s prison there are no windows and only internal courtyards, which can be rather disorienting as his only connection with the passage of the seasons is a rectangular patch of sky. Convicts are taken from various regions and shipped to whichever prison has vacancy, and consequently prisoners may end up very far from their hometown. This makes visits challenging for family and friends, as they may have to cross an entire state in order to reach their loved one for the three-hour visiting session.
2. When did you initiate your collaborative art project with your brother Marcel?
Shortly after my brother went to prison a gang member attacked him and a guard appeared as my brother was defending himself by pinning the other man down. Without being able to explain what had happened the two of them were sentenced to six months in “LOP”, which stands for “loss of privileges” or solitary confinement. Shortly after this event was Marcel's 21st birthday and my father and I drove eight hours in the fog to be able to spend the limited one-hour visit with him behind glass. Marcel expressed the angst that he felt and the idleness of being confined to a small cell with no access out except for a couple five-minute showers a week, by which he was taken to in handcuffs. His food tray was passed through a slot in the door. We wanted him to have material to read at least. I ordered him a subscription to “Architecture Digest”, and after reading it, Marcel began ripping out the pages and folding origami flower petals. He sent these petals to me in envelopes asking if I could glue them together, as he had no glue, and the coffee creamer and soap that he had tried to adhere them together with was not always strong enough. Marcel spent hours folding these small petals, as a way to pass his time, keeping his hands busy. They began to accumulate on my end, and although Marcel’s intention was for me to try and sell them on “E-bay”, I found them far to precious and decided to use them to make an art installation as part of my senior thesis at Pacific Northwest College of Art.
3. How does isolation effect one’s creativity?
Being in isolation can be extremely idle, and in order to combat feelings of stagnation and boredom Marcel found that having an outlet to express himself creatively was helpful for staying relaxed in such a rigid environment. Often artists seek isolation, as it is needed for introspection and for the imagination to flourish. Solitude can be necessary for accessing one’s inner creativity, however complete sensory deprivation can lead to negative effects on the mind and body. For example, my brother’s eyesight was impaired by not being able to look in the distance for those six months.
4. In the book of Shakespeare the prince Hamlet declares that Denmark is
like a prison. In your and Marcel’s collaboration "isolation" is first
and foremost connected with territory. How does this zone, which is physically defended with borders, foster isolation?
A prison can be a country or a building or even a state of mind. It can have physical borders, but it can also be a series of internal barriers that one sets for oneself. A prison is somewhere that you do not feel free. As for the “prison zone”- one is not free to make very many of their own decisions. You are given an identity number and you are told with whom you are going to share a cell with. You are at the mercy of the guards and gang members who are sharing the same “big house”. It is isolating because you cannot go out and seek your own life, choose your own job, socialize with whom you would like to socialize with. An inmate is lucky if they have someone devoted enough to visit them from the outside or to send them a letter.
5. How is your collaboration like "border crossing"?
There is a similar feeling going into the prison as passing through an airport. Everyone going in the prison to visit has to check in with a valid I.D. card and they have to be on the appropriate visiting list with no criminal history. Then you have to pass through a metal detector and follow the dress code to ensure that nobody is dressed in blue jeans, or similar attire to the prisoners. You are given an invisible stamp on your hand, which you have to show under a black light. In order to reach the visiting room you pass through various automated doors, which are under high surveillance. The guards choose where you are to sit for your visiting session and they tell you when your time is up. One of the most difficult moments for me is after the visit when the inmates line up on one side of the room and the visitors on the other and I have the right to leave and my brother has to stay behind. Email is not permitted in prison, but Marcel has sent hundreds of letters home to all of the members of my family describing what life in prison is like for him. They are very strict about what kinds of things can be sent into the prison. They inspect all of his mail, and I have had letters returned to me, because they have a smear of lipstick on the envelope, and they deem it “ a foreign substance”. Phone calls are also monitored and recorded and they are very expensive. My whole family has made our cell phones the area code of the prison in order to reduce those costs for my brother. The origami that he was making and sending out was also prohibited, that the hollow space inside the origami was somehow a threat to the security of the institution. Contraband could be hidden in them, never mind that he was just making them to pass the time and to send out to his family. However, it was so important for Marcel to make origami that he covertly folded them by night, in his cell. They did not inspect what he was sending out, so we managed to have several exhibitions including his origami work. Although being a potencial risk of punishment for Marcel, this kind of creative deviance added yet another layer to the work.
6. Since prison is a rather taboo subject matter in American society, how does your family cope with Marcel’s incarceration?
At first it was difficult to be able to talk about my brother's incarceration openly with my friends and teachers. I was not ashamed of him, but I felt like it was just one of those things that people do not discuss, as it is not a fun or happy topic. My entire family was a bit in shock, as Marcel; despite having always been a mischievous kid was never seen as a serious threat to society. My mother wrote a lot about her feelings of helplessness and pain in relation to having her youngest son put in an adult prison for seven years. We all try to support him by writing him as much as possible and keeping him informed about changes in our lives. We spend holidays, such as Christmas with him in prison. My way of coping with the inadequacy that I feel to help him through his sentence is to collaborate artistically with him, and giving him an opportunity to show his creations in another context outside of prison.
7. At your opening lecture at the Y gallery you referred to yourself
As a “mediator” of social exchange, did you mean you are an “arbitrator”?
I see myself as being a facilitator, or mediator in that I am opening up a dialogue that may not have been so easy to have otherwise. Despite, the overwhelming American prison population not very many people on the outside are aware of it. They may have seen a very glamorized Hollywood version of prison, but they are not familiar with the dismal reality that prisoners face. Since putting myself in a position where I can re-contextualize my brother’s raw experiences and creations, compiling them into a cohesive body of work it has become my objective to curate the work, abstracting it into a conceptual, and yet socially accessible art. In return, Marcel offers me a filter in which to see my own life and to reconcider what I view as problems.
8. How is your work effected by embracing the same limited materials that Marcel has access to?
I decided to voluntarily embrace using the same limited materials as Marcel as a form of solidarity to his situation and efforts to work within constraints.
I have not yet taken the leap into using his same limited tools. As I was carving eighty stanchions out of soviet soap here in Mooste, Estonia I thought of him carving teeth out of soap with his prison I.D. card as a way to learn dental anatomy and was really impressed with his perseverance. Working with limited materials can be very rewarding, as it forces you to have to think in very unconventional ways, which actually seems to dilate the creative process. After having been in art school with such an over saturation of mediums to choose from I found it relieving to work within this “narrower palette”, so to speak.
9. Could you give a general overview of your collaborative works in Y gallery?
I mailed a few pieces from the U.S.A to Tartu for this show “Marcelit Moostele”. I mailed an entire shoebox filled with origami scorpions, each taking an hour for Marcel to fold. I arranged these in a labyrinth on one of the gallery walls. They speak of the passage of time both in a literal and more symbolic way. Also included in the show is an origami chess set, which Marcel made while in isolation so that he could play with the inmate in the next cell- through the wall. The board is made out of a handkerchief with small blue squares, which he cut out with a razor from an old T-shirt.
I also sent in the mail a series of ivory soap teeth, which my brother had carved, in order to prepare himself for joining my uncle’s business in dental technology. Marcel also carved some small figurines, or busts of some of the other inmates in the prison out of soap. I positioned these busts next to the responses to a question that I had asked Marcel to ask some of the inmates in his prison, “what makes you feel isolated or alone?”. I also included in the exhibition a small book that Marcel wrote and illustrated called “The Convict Cookbook”, which shows you how you can pass the time in prison, and how you can resourcefully create things like lighters, tattoo guns, mouse traps out of available prison materials.
As for the work that I made while at MoKS, Center for Art and Social Practice I had brought a few kernels of inspiration for new work- a drawing that Marcel had made me of this idea I had to make a labyrinth out of stanchions, and a weeks worth of keeping a food log in prison, describing what was on his meal tray each day. He had depicted this by drawing the small-compartmentalized tray and describing what was in each space.
From these two things I was inspired to make several larger projects. I realized a three dimensional version of his drawing, by carving all eighty stanchions out of soap and installing them in an installation next to his drawing. I eliminated the cord between the posts as a way to abstract it even further, suggesting that perchance our hindrances are perceived from the inside, and projected to the outside world. I also kept record of my food consumption during the month I spent in Mooste by saving all of the food packaging. I condensed one month’s food wrappers into one week’s worth of meal trays, which I made to accompany his. I wanted to draw a parallel between the monotony and disorientation that we each experienced while passing time in these different isolated places.
The final piece that I made while here in Estonia is a projection which is titled “Isolating landscapes” which shows alternating images from Oregon where my brother is serving his prison sentence to the surrounding areas around Mooste, where I have spent a month collaborating with him, in this sort of self inflicted exile in order to share some of the same feelings of isolation and disorientation that Marcel deals with in prison.
