This installation examines bureaucracy not as a neutral administrative system but as a structure capable of producing exclusion, invisibility, and violence. Focusing on the Italian prison system, the work considers how institutional procedures disproportionately affect those who already occupy the most precarious social positions: people facing linguistic barriers, mental illness, addiction, and social isolation. Within these environments, bureaucracy extends beyond paperwork and regulation, becoming a mechanism through which care is delayed, communication is obstructed, and vulnerability is intensified.
At the centre of the installation is the story of Said, a 22-year-old Moroccan man who was incarcerated in Milan's San Vittore prison in 2025. After months of isolation, limited contact with his family, and repeated difficulties accessing communication and healthcare through complex administrative procedures, Said died by suicide on 24 June 2025. His story is not presented as an exceptional tragedy but as an entry point into broader structural conditions that shape everyday life within the prison system.
The installation reconstructs a fictional bureaucratic office, inviting visitors into a space that feels at once ordinary and oppressive. A large desk, scattered documents, a newspaper, and other seemingly mundane objects gradually reveal fragments of Said's experience. A telephone continuously receives voicemail messages addressed to an unseen prison director. These recordings remain exclusively in Italian, withholding translation and confronting visitors with the experience of linguistic exclusion that many incarcerated people encounter when navigating institutional systems.
Beyond the office, live surveillance footage is transmitted to a monitor elsewhere in the exhibition, extending the installation into the surrounding space. This dual perspective implicates the viewer within systems of observation while exposing the asymmetry between visibility and accountability: those subjected to surveillance often remain unseen within the institutions that monitor them.
Rather than reconstructing a specific event, the installation exposes the bureaucratic infrastructures through which institutional violence can become ordinary. It asks how administrative systems, often understood as impartial and procedural, can themselves function as forms of punishment, producing conditions in which neglect is normalized and responsibility becomes increasingly difficult to locate.