On the night from Sunday to Monday, in Reading, in the south of England, a new mural, supposedly the work of Banksy, appeared on the wall of an abandoned prison.
Representing a prisoner escaping by means of sheets, attached to a typewriter and knotted to form a rope, the work is reminiscent of the building's most famous inmate: Oscar Wilde himself, condemned to two years in prison after being found guilty of
"gross indecency"
- in plain homosexuality - in 1985.
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The stencil discovered on Monday by residents on the prison wall.
MATTHEW CHILDS / REUTERS
For the moment, no confirmation from the artist allows us to say that this is one of his frescoes.
Banksy, active since the 1990s and whose identity is unknown (it is assumed that he is British), usually posts his works on his Instagram account.
Which is not, for the time being, the case with this new stencil.
The uncertainty did not, however, prevent the curious from congregating around the attraction, phones in hand.
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Closed since November 2013, the penitentiary center was sold in 2015 to a consortium of real estate developers.
In 2016, however, the building was made available to the city in order to make it a temporary exhibition space.
A campaign is, moreover, still in progress to transform it definitively into an art center.
