This Friday, an exhibition of photographs taken by inmates of the Tahíche Penitentiary Center will be presented at the Casa de los Arroyo in Arrecife. At the same time, at that event that will take place at 8 pm, the first issue of the magazine ‘Tahíche Opina’ will also be presented, also written by the inmates of the center.
This exhibition, which can be seen from Monday to Friday in the morning, and the new publication are the result of the workshops given by the photographer Gerson Díaz and the journalist Saúl García to the inmates. In addition to these two workshops, the cultural program that has been developed is completed with a theater workshop given by the actor and author Salvador Leal. Within this last one, the inmates have prepared five short pieces by Antón Chejov that will be performed on July 14 at the Tahiche penitentiary center.
These workshops come from the Derecho y Justicia Association, which for years has been providing training and legal advice to people who are in the penitentiary center. In the three courses, taught twice a week, more than 50 students have participated.
Haikus, stories and pinhole cameras in the workshops
The germ of ‘Tahíche Opina’ is the literary and reading promotion workshop in which the inmates have written stories, poems, haikus or letters on their own initiative or as exercises within the workshop. The magazine is illustrated with drawings and photographs taken by the inmates and also has other sections, such as a dictionary of prison words and another invented one, cartoons, horoscope, word search and even an interview with the director of the Penitentiary Center, Juan Hidalgo. The students received a visit from the writers Antonio Martín Medina, Miguel Aguerralde and José Manuel Díez, who explained their respective experiences with literature.
On the other hand, the photography exhibition consists of 17 portraits taken by the inmates of other inmates during the workshop. Some of the photographs are taken with a digital camera and others with a pinhole camera, since each student in the workshop built their own camera with a matchbox and two reels to learn in a practical way how a camera works. In this course, the students have mainly worked on portraiture.
The magazine will be sold at the exhibition venue and in other parts of Arrecife for the will of whoever acquires it and in order to be able to pay for the next issues of this publication. The workshops, the exhibition and the magazine have also been possible thanks to the collaboration of the Publications Service of the Cabildo de Lanzarote and Penitentiary Institutions.