San Vittore

The work San Vittore won the second edition of the Italian Council (2017), a competition conceived by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Urban Peripheries (DGAAP) – an organism of the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, to promote Italian contemporary art in the world. San Vittore stems from the artist’s reflections on the condition of children whose parents are in prison. Ancarani came into contact with a non-profit association that has been working for years in Milan’s prison San Vittore to protect relationships between parents in jail and their children, safeguarding their rights. The film by Ancarani lingers on details of the complex world of children, focusing on those who each day enter and leave the prison. The film also describes the strict security measures minors are subject to once they enter San Vittore to visit their parent. The ways in which children’s imagination elaborates the prison world are narrated by the artist through drawings made by the minors themselves. In some of these, as if by eerie magic, the jail becomes a castle, inhabited by kings and queens.