“Casa Azul” (Blue House) is part of a socio-visual developed with the sociologist research Chloé Constant, about the life histories of five trans women imprisoned in a male penitentiary in Mexico City. Nr. 302/460, Nr. 277/460

The Project shows the process of identity construction and corporal practices of people whose bodies are considered double wretched: due to their identity and also to their condition of seclusion.

Since it is mandatory for the prisoners to wear blue, they call the jail “the blue house”, evoking the imprisonment suffered in their own bodies. In male jail, it is forbidden to pass feminine objects, but throughout corruption, the prisoners manage to do it. By doing this, these feminine objects in a male jail become resistance tools against an environment that imposes them the masculine. For the images in this project, Iacolutti has used photographs printed in cyanotype – an old printing system. In one of her visits to jail, in the library, Iacolutti found a Biology textbook from the ’90s that acknowledges the cell as the basic unit of life. So to blueprints, she has added microscopic photographs of healthy cells processed in pink, taken in collaboration with the Institute of Biomedical Research of Bellevitge (IDIBELL). The general staining procedure with hematoxylin-eosin used in histology paints the tissue samples in pink and blue. In the book, the blue evokes the exterior and the passive identification while the pink talks about the interior, of the self, and of self-determination. “Casa Azul” shows the eternal binary struggle that these people have to face in everyday life to be what they perceive themselves - as women.