The Illustrated History of Prison Slang was conceived in the impossible. ApsArt could not make project PAROL! in Serbian prisons, because the administrative department in charge of serving sentences would not give its permission. But as life always demonstrates, impossibilities are often a catapult for the liberation of new ideas and creative solutions. Thus, a dramaturge, director and three fine artists created this uncommon work with former convicts.

Dictionaries are means for communication and understanding. Although jails are often found in populated places, in cities and villages, they are a kind of parallel universe in which everything is different, and even time passes differently. A totally new and different reality starts behind bars. And this is why this dictionary was made.

The Illustrated History of Prison Slang is the work of former inmates, people who have lived in the world behind bars and got to know it. They turned their unwillingly acquired knowledge and learned survival techniques into the creative, playful, vital, powerful and painfully sincere work. In the images it is the work of the artists Nikola Korać and Branko Tešević, who visualised this strange world and gave it the note of a raw yet refined urban strip that awakens the fantasy and leaves nobody indifferent.

The worst penalty is that in us, the highest walls those that are between people. Creativity is liberating, and once won, the interior freedom of man can be revoked by no kind of prisons and walls. The Illustrated History of Prison Slang aims at raising awareness of freedom and the path that has been passed by the people who compiled it – a path in search of the truth about the world in which we live and our place in it.