Manifesting solitude: invisible personal narratives of confinement, power and violence in the contemporary US prison industrial complex.

I began writing letters to my friend Keith 9-years ago after he participated in my award-winning feature The Divide (2016). After hitchhiking across America aged 15, spending a decade living on the side of the road, he was arrested for methamphetamine possession and sentenced to 26-years in a Texan prison. Typewritten letters are his only means of communication with the outside world: no phone, no internet, no "real time" conversation. He is one of 48,000 rendered invisible by the practice of solitary confinement in the US.

As the UN urges the immediate revocation of this practice as a form of torture (Mendez, 2022), a greater understanding of these erased human beings is vital. Yet although existing scholarship addresses the psychiatric and human effects, such as anger, boredom, loss of reality, and violent fantasies (Guenther (2013), Grassian (1983), Haney (2018), and Rhodes (2004), it does not give academic attention to personal narrativity and the importance of the embodied knowledge of this marginalised group.

My research hands power to a demographic stripped of agency as I collaborate with Keith to excavate our extensive letter archive alongside my own video materials, a critical intervention in the creation of relational knowledge. I aim to answer the question: How can non-fiction film make visible the erased knowledge within the solitary cell, to allow a reclamation of narrative and emphasize the urgency of inflicted harm and social erasure?

This interdisciplinary study analyses theories of embodied perception, psychogeography, power, sites of disappearance and hauntology (Merleau-Ponty 1945, Debord 1955, Foucault 1975, Gordon 1997) alongside our mutual correspondence. This critical analysis will inform a series of autoethnographic films co-created with Keith to conjure, reframe and embed the epistolary narrative into the social landscape of the contemporary US.

Keith is empowered as a collaborator in the co-creation of knowledge, with a rigorous process of informed consent, regular psychological supervision and transparent communication in a reflexive and rigorous ethical process that enables agency. The result is a body of artistic practice that interrogates how the trauma contained within the solitary cell "haunts" and manifests in contemporary US society.

This research builds upon my established film practice, contributing to cinematic methodologies to expand understanding of the human effects of confinement, whilst also rebalancing and destabilising dominant narrative power around the issue to generate a significant contribution to knowledge. The work will reframe the understanding of how systems of power make themselves known and felt in everyday life, opening new avenues for expanded knowledge through re-situating the "hidden" experience within the cell into the outside world, whilst also contributing to experimental cinematic techniques and methodologies.

In re-positioning voices of the cell into society, we expand the equality, inclusion, and diversity of our knowledge systems.