Fresnes (France) (AFP)

For the past few months, Fresnes prison has been populated with colorful ghosts. Resistance fighters, provocative writers, fallen industrialists ... Under the bombs of the graffiti artist C215, former residents reappear on the century-old walls and question the current prisoners about their destiny.

Under the harsh passageways of this penal establishment built at the end of the 19th century, Christian Guémy, alias "C215", seems as at ease as in the open air. With one hand, he places his meticulously designed stencils on the wall, which he sprinkles with the other with his colorful aerosols.

Pink, orange, turquoise are superimposed on the black shadows, while the artist hums the song "Undress me". Suddenly, the face of his interpreter, Juliette Greco, appears between two cells of the women's remand center.

"It's too beautiful," breathes Marine *, who observes this unusual ballet. Detained for nine months, this Toulousaine was unaware that Greco, whose mother was resistant, was also imprisoned in Fresnes.

"It intrigues me," continues the thirty-something, touched by this variegated portrait.

"With this tag, it will be much warmer," rejoices the one who admits having felt "completely lost", when she landed in this prison regularly denounced for her insanitary conditions.

C215 savored these moments of emotion, he who hoped to "humanize the prison" and "bring a little escape", to the prisoners and to the guards.

Grids, cells, barbed wire: "the prison universe is mechanical, clocked. I try to bring an arrhythmia, to break this sanitized system", explains to AFP this great name of street-art, which has already painted in more than fifteen prisons.

He graffiti voluntarily, as some "prisoners need to scrape the walls, to write their names on the toilet, to reverse the relationship of domination of the container on the human."

In Fresnes, one of the oldest prisons in France, south of Paris, the stencil artist found an exceptional canvas. By summoning more than a century of history, he has disseminated the faces of emblematic prisoners, chosen to encourage "reflection on risk-taking and self-determination".

Among the thirty portraits, the 46-year-old artist pays particular tribute to figures of the Resistance: the Armenian communist Missak Manouchian, the journalist Pierre Brossolette or the poet Robert Desnos, all imprisoned in Fresnes during the Occupation. "It can be comforting to say to yourself: + look, there is a resistance fighter who struggled here like me +."

- "Bounce" -

Conversely, Pierre Laval, pillar of the Vichy regime imprisoned and shot at Fresnes, and the industrialist Louis Renault, accused of economic collaboration with the Germans, recall that "even a great man can fall".

There are also those who have sublimated their passage to Fresnes. The actor Alain Delon, never imprisoned but who played child in the courtyard, because the husband of his nurse was a maton. The writer Jean Genet, imprisoned for petty theft, whose stay behind bars has fueled the provocative work. Or the former Algerian president Mohamed Boudiaf, captive in France when he was one of the leaders of the FLN, before the independence of his country.

These works "allow inmates to bring a little relativity to their detention, by visualizing other people who have been in their place", hopes the director of the prison, Jimmy Deliste, who sees "many delinquents by habit and few criminals "among the almost 1,700 inmates of his establishment

"I don't want the prison to be a place of abandonment, to open up avenues of cultural reflection here, it is essential", continues C215.

A speech that the artist, who has also painted historical figures of the defense of rights like Nelson Mandela or Robert Badinter, gives during meetings with detainees.

"Here, it can be a place to bounce back, you can have time to think about the meaning of your life," he says to several of them. "These portraits are there so that you do not feel alone, if you want to take the path of reintegration."

For Habib, the message resonates. "When we find ourselves here, it is because we have not necessarily made the right choices," confides this inmate. At 31, he resumed his studies in prison and hopes to open a hair salon when he leaves, but fears that he will be fined heavily during his future trial. "If I have too much debt, will I plunge again?"

* The names of the detainees have been changed

© 2020 AFP