Never been ( )

Never been ( ) | Snap-Projects, Lyon 2015 |
from 24 janvier to 28 février 2015

exhibition with Nadia Guerroui, Perrine Lacroix and Ninakarlin Prinz
Wires
Several cables are stretched in the space. They connect the different works of this collective exhibition, they draw lines in space, hyphens and bonds.
They remind us of the anti-escape Wires in the prison courts.

Grid
At the cell windows of the St. Paul prison, grids lined the bars to prevent the inmates from exchanging yo-yos and messages. Despite this ban, each Grid is more or less grazed. This widely open mouth enables the inmates to communicate with the outside world.

BA 27/04/42 - 31/05/43
In this series of drawings, each line traces a day of Berty Albrecht’s detention.
An activist, she was  fighting against fascism as early as 1927, and campaigned for contraception and abortion rights. In 1933, she created a feminist journal, The Sexual Problem (Le Problème Sexuel).
In 1941, with Henri Frenay, she founded the movement Combat. The Vichy government police arrested her at her home in Lyon on April 27, 1942. She was administratively and arbitrarily detained in May 1942 at Vals-les- Bains. After a 13-days hunger strike, she was imprisoned at St. Joseph’s Prison, before succeeding in being taken in at the Vinatier pscyhiatric hospital, from which she escaped on December 23, 1942, thanks to her movement allies. Refusing to travel to England, she joined Henri Frenay at the Gouze family home in Cluny -Danièle Mitterrand’s family. Caught by Barbie’s gestapo in Mâcon on May 28, 1943, she was tortured and transferred to the Fresnes Prison where she hanged herself on the night of May 31st.