Solitary

In South Korea, you can go to “prison” to relax. Sounds strange? Well, it is. You can get locked up in solitary confinement in a wellness centre designed like a prison. You lock out responsibilities, work, stress and emails and focus on your inner self. At least that’s the concept. “The true prison is the world outside,” says the founder of the jail-themed retreat.⁠
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For this weirdly fantastic book we want to present here, artist Tyler Coburn commissioned ten creatives to spend time in five square metres of solitude in this wellness centre – and write. They handed in their phones, exchanged their clothes for a uniform, took their rice porridge meals through a door slot and slept on the floor. ⁠
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During their time in this mock prison, they were guided in their writing by certain questions: How can the relaxation promised by Happitory be reconciled with the way solitary confinement works in real prisons? What kinds of thinking and writing are made possible by the restrictions – no books, no internet, only writing materials? How might the writing here relate to other texts produced in prison, such as those by Oscar Wilde, Antonio Gramsci, Kim Dae-jung, Shin Young-bok?⁠
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In its entirety, ‘Solitary’ is unique in that it is both a collection of texts and a collective artwork: an experiment in site-specific writing.⁠