TEN YEARS & EIGHTYSEVEN DAYS / ZEHN JAHRE & SIEBENUNDACHTZIG TAGE
Ein Projekt von Luisa Menazzi Moretti über Häftlinge im Todestrakt, Texas, USA
…Do not wound yourself in me, for it will be useless,…do not wound me because you wound yourself.
(Pablo Neruda, The Well)
"I lived in Texas for many years, a State which holds the first position for executions amongst the democratic nations of the Western World. The letters and interviews that those sentenced to death have written or answered in the prison of Huntsville death row have inspired my pictures. After a wait that lasts an avarage time of ten years and eightyseven days, the prisoners are executed. They live all this time alone, in touch with the world only throught the legal acts that concern them, and can have- only if they act with good behavior – a small radio and some books. They are not always and unquestionably guilty. My pictures are the result of their words; I shot them thinking at those who are left, keeping in mind the families of those who were executed, at the cruelty that often reveal the crimes, or the absence of cruelty in other circumstances. I ask myself: which are the feeling and reasons that in the XXI Century can justify such an arcaic practice as letal execution? Many are the nations which practice this barbaric sentence. Every citizen should feel not represented by a Nation that uses its power to kill a man, whether guilty or innocent."
Luisa Menazzi Moretti
