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Flip side: Prison stories
Flip Side: Prison Stories is an immersive installation that brings viewers into the lived realities of women navigating life inside prison—challenging the stereotypes that too often cast them as violent, unstable, or broken.
Using a documentary approach, Cesco centres the kind of footage usually dismissed as b-roll—fragments, pauses, and moments in between. What emerges is a portrait of prison life marked not just by struggle, but by humour, resilience, and the relationships that help these women survive within an unforgiving system.
The project was built collaboratively. The women involved shaped the work from the inside, designing and crafting the masks that protect their identities and contributing personal letters that open a window into their inner lives. These creative gestures are acts of agency—reclaiming narrative in a space that so often strips it away.
The installation mirrors a traditional support group setting, placing the viewer not as a distant observer but as a participant in the circle. In doing so, Flip Side blurs the boundary between inside and outside, inviting us to sit with the uncomfortable truths about social injustice, gendered punishment, and the systemic forces that lead so many women to incarceration.
This is not just a story about prison. It’s about who gets to be seen, who gets to be heard—and what happens when we really listen.
London, UK
2023
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