During his incarceration in an American prison, Jesse Krimes (b. 1982, lives and works in Philadelphia, U.S.A.) invented for his co-prisoners and himself a means of symbolic escape with the materials given to him by the penitentiary administration.

He methodically cut out portraits of his peers in the newspaper, transferred these images onto bars of soap that he then dissimulated in card decks prepared for the purpose. In this way he was able to deceive the vigilance of the prison guards in order to release these hidden portraits in letters sent to the outside world.

These 300 or so portraits became proof of the existence of these hundreds of individuals absent from a world from which they have been banished. By bypassing the restrictions on freedom and symbolically reintegrating the existence of these ghosts into a territory whose access has been physically denied them, Jesse Krimes engaged in an act of resistance.