1986 Or A Sphinx's Interior (38 min)

Director: Robert Glas

In 1986 the Norwegian prison abolitionist Thomas Mathiesen said: "There is a clear and strong tendency towards expansions of the prison system throughout the Western world. Even in Holland, traditionally the country with a low prison rate in Europe, the flagship telling the world that it is possible to have a complex industrialized society with very few prisoners, there is now a noticeable expansion in the making."In the same year the renowned architect Carel Weeber drawed his design for a prison complex in Rotterdam, De Schie, one of the many Dutch prisons build in the 80's, and in use to this day. As part of his design process Weeber ordered the construction of a scale 1:1 test setup of a single prison cell. While there are conflicting accounts on how the test went about, one thing is certain: such a test demands the imagination of how the space will be used, by whom and in what condition they are. For his film "1986, Or A Sphinx's Interior" Robert Glas meticulously rebuild Weebers test set up. Working with the actor Ali-Ben Horsting, Carel Weeber himself and a former detainee of his prison, various versions of Weebers visit to the test setup are constructed and reconstructed. The result orbits around the question on how to imagine how a life and a body are affected by the confinement to a prison cell, this sentence we talk about so often and know so little about.