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The Politics of Freedom

The Domesticated Foxes of Bastøy

Veronique Aïcha considers the ideology of imprisonment.

“The cosmos screams. The concrete bears witness to the violence with which it was turned into a wall.”
Michel Houellebecq, Rester Vivant, 1991

April 11th 2024 marked fifty years since the release of the film Papillon, based on the thrilling book by Henri Charrière from 1969 about the penal colony Devil’s Island in French Guiana, upon which Charrière was once imprisoned. Fifty years after the release of the film, I visited another prison island, Bastøy in Norway, where I was guided around by its former director, Tom Eberhardt.

In recent years there has been much attention across the world upon this prison island because of Michael Moore’s documentary Where to Invade Next? of 2015, which extensively featured Bastøy as ‘the prison of the future’.

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