Casa Azul – Giulia Iacolutti

Casa Azul is part of a socio-visual research about the life stories of five trans women imprisoned in one of the male penitentiaries in Mexico City. The project shows the process of identity construction and corporal practices of people whose bodies are considered doubly abject: due to their identity and to their condition of seclusion. Since it is mandatory for prisoners to wear blue, they have called the jail “the blue house”, alluding to the imprisonment they suffer in their own male bodies. 

In the male jail, it is forbidden to have feminine objects, but through corruption, prisoners smuggle some things in. By doing this, these feminine articles in a male jail become resistance tools against an environment that imposes masculinity on them. Finding a biology manual from the 1990s in a prison’s classroom triggered the development of the parallelism with Biology, a science that recognizes the cell as the basic unit of life. 

The general staining procedure with hematoxylin-eosin used in histology paints the tissue samples pink. The photographs printed in cyanotype – an old printing system, characterized by the Prussian blue colour – were joined with microscopic photographs of healthy prostatic cells processed in pink taken. Thus, if the blue evokes the exterior and the imposed identification, the pink stands for the interior, for the self and the self-determination. Casa Azul shows the binary, the eternal struggle of these people to be what they are: women. 

limited edition of 500 copies (including special edition of 40 copies)

stock number: NB691