In the autobiographical novel Rebibbia University, Goliarda Sapenzia tells the story of her stay in an Italian prison in 1980. To the contacts of political and common law prisoners, the experience of imprisonment mutates into a violent and magnificent moment of freedom.
Taking a sharp look at the spatial elements that make up the prison universe, the author describes the simple gestures of appropriation that allow prisoners to transform spaces and the relationships that are at play there: this individual who, with a few pieces of colored fabrics on the walls, a mat and a little paint on the ceiling lamp has managed to transform four walls into an invigorating environment of intellectual exchanges and meditations, can only be in search of a different way to exist with oneself-same and the others. The domestic becomes political, because between the poor mats and the few flowers placed in a mustard glass, appears the most radical of the popular universities.
The Book Club is modestly part of this logic of reappropriation of spaces of knowledge by women, in a format often considered by common opinion as dusty and bourgeois. Through the simple pleasure of collective reading, it is the very image of the woman who reads that is at stake.
The library Les Donneuses de courage is accessible throughout the duration of the exhibition.