Light behind the grid was an exercise on translating the culture of a prison’s microcosm to a line of lighting fixtures.

Bars are everywhere in prison, and we wanted to translate that to the lamp. After extensive material research, we decided to work with metal wire mesh, which proved easy to manipulate and had a metaphoric relation to the project. 

One day, I arrived in the workshop in prison, and there were two shades decorated with the rags. One inmate, Loro, said he “didn’t like the way it looked” and that he wanted it to look more like the cells they were living in, “full of ‘stuff’ hanging everywhere”. The ‘solution’ was there all the time, but needed to be brought up by the inmates.

*photos from the NGO’s quarters, inside the prison