Created for Portchester Castle in the south of England, Elaine Mitchener’s sound installation Les Murs Sont Témoins | These Walls Bear Witness examines the building’s past as a prison during the 18th and 19th centuries. The piece focuses on the period of French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars between 1793–1815, when some 8000 prisoners of war were incarcerated there, over 2000 of them being African-Caribbean in origin.

Commissioned by the University Of Warwick, Mitchener collaborated on the piece with researchers Abigail Coppins and Professor Katherine Astbury, drawing on personal letters, registers and plays written and performed by the prisoners.

Les Murs Sont Témoins | These Walls Bear Witness is on show until the end of November 2019. On 15 November Mitchener will be in conversation with Astbury and Coppins .