Fresh Creations: How Genoa Prisoners Make Bags from Recycled Materials

A recycling and reuse workshop, using waste materials to create bags and fashion accessories. The goal is to transform prison sentences into rehabilitation and the opportunity to learn a trade. Bags, placemats, accessories, and furnishings, designed and crafted by women and girls incarcerated in the prison. Genoa Pontedecimo Prison, into unique pieces with an original design, using disused PVC advertising banners and broken umbrella canopies.

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FRESH CREATIONS

It's Al Fresco Creations, Craft and creative activities that originate within prison walls but are definitely not confined to the four walls of a cell. The goal of the social promotion association Sc'Art, which manages the project, is to integrate this workshop activity into a comprehensive resocialization project, opening up, as mentioned, new perspectives and a re-educational purpose to the punitive measure of detention. Starting with a real atelier where the objects produced within the workshop are sold and displayed, in Vico Angeli 21, Genoa.

A key aspect of the project, in addition to the inmates' desire for redemption and emancipation, is nurturing relationships and enhancing personal skills as tools for looking to the future with renewed energy and vision.

The synergy between Sc'Art and the Genova Pontedecimo prison, female section, began in 2013, when the association began to organize courses with female prisoners, such as x-prisoners or girls and women subjected to alternative punishments to detention, never losing sight of the human and re-educational aspect of the sentence: «The aim of our workshops is to develop personal skills – she explains in an interview with the portal Italia che Cambia,  Emanuela Musso, a Genoese costume designer and screenwriter, project coordinator and artistic director of Sc'Art – valorizing the creativity and self-esteem of each individual woman who participates in the meetings, gradually transforming craftsmanship into a concrete tool for rethinking one's future.

TO KNOW MORE: Free agricultural food: Inmates in Rebibbia prison produce quality cheeses.

SC'ART GENOA ASSOCIATION

Not only that, working inside prison addresses the need to become independent and useful, especially to one's family, to whom many workers send a portion of their wages. A comprehensive rehabilitation, which even allows some inmates to be assumed by the associationOnce released, they will be offered permanent contracts, given their acquired skills and abilities, which are irreplaceable, as Sc'Art president Etta Rapallo emphasizes in the same interview: "Ours is one of the very few organizations in the area to have managed to establish an agreement with the prison," she says, "which allows us to benefit from incentives and tax breaks for hiring these women, some of whom continue to work with us even after they are released."

The Sc'art network, an association that in its work brings together environmental issues and social inclusion projects, includes, in the Genoa area, in addition to the atelier in the historic center and the laboratory in Pontedecimo, also another laboratory inside an Arci club, in Bolzaneto, but also and above all a system of agreements and support: from those who supply the raw materials, that is the PVC banners and advertising banners to be recycled, to those, like Coop and other large-scale retail outlets, who commission 850 bags from the laboratories every Christmas for the members of the annual assembly, as in the case of Christmas 2019.

(Images featured and accompanying the text taken from the Sc'art Facebook page)

STORIES FROM PRISON:

• Punta de Rieles, the Uruguayan prison model that feels like a small town. Without bars.
• Bisonti Rugby, the team born in prison that hopes to return
• The Campobasso school, where inmates clean. In exchange, they study and graduate (photo)