Thomas Henriot. La prison du Mechouar

Thomas Henriot & Ferrante Ferranti, La prison du Mechouar, Paris, Éditions Lord Byron, 2021

1st edition
Edition of 500 copies
Hard cover, 21 x 31 cm, 60 pages
French Edition
ISBN : 978-2-491901-19-6

La prison du Mechouar is a book imagined by Thomas Henriot and Ferrante Ferranti on the former prison of the Kasbah of Tangier, just reconverted into a contemporary art center.

« In this magnificent exchange that Ferrante Ferranti and Thomas Henriot propose here, photography does not duplicate the drawing. On the contrary, it extends it and sometimes short-circuits it. It constitutes the reverse or an unexpected complement. Field against field sometimes. Secret analogies are woven between the gaze that frames and that which reconstructs. Like any space that we invest with our senses, the book that you hold in your hands is nothing other than a sensitive architecture that you must make vibrate, by turning each page. » (Olivier Rachet)

Thomas Henriot (born in 1980) is a French artist living and working between France and Cuba. The Chinese ink drawing is the technique that he favors and deepens with traditional Chinese painters during a stay in China in the early 2000s.

Ferrante Ferranti was born in 1960 in Algeria. A traveler photographer, he has been engaged for thirty years with Dominique Fernandez in a common exploration of the Baroque and the different strata of civilizations, from Syria to Bolivia, passing through Sicily and St. Petersburg. His photographs dialogue with the texts of the writer, who defines him in the album Itinerrances (Actes Sud, 2013) as "the inventor of a language that connects the sun to the ruins, in search of the meaning hidden under the forms".

Born in 1971, Olivier Rachet is a literary and artistic critic, writer and independent journalist living in Casablanca. He is a professor of modern literature and cinema-audiovisual. For many years he has published literary columns for various websites, and has collaborated with various newspapers and magazines such as Les Cahiers de Tinbad and Artpress.