Temps mort, with Al (2009) is a film compiled from short videos recorded over nine months by two prisoners using a mobile phone that had been smuggled into the prison. Following the artist’s instructions, a film takes shape through an exchange of SMS and MMS — a collaborative artwork. The fragments of daily life depict suspended time and the constrained bodies of incarcerated lives. As manifestations of digital obsolescence, the low-resolution images also reflect the precarity of the conditions within this space. Through this film-making process, Bourouissa offers the prisoners the right to their own image — the image being, for the artist, an object of power. “This work highlights an intimate relationship between a free person and an imprisoned one. We enter a kind of off-screen space, a form of free zone. It is the encounter between two temporalities: one slowed down, halted, frozen by the carceral environment, and the other rapid, relentless, constantly in motion,” says Bourouissa. Through this portrait of a “socially absent, confined” individual, the mechanisms of exclusion in contemporary societies are revealed.