About the project
Guantanamo: If The Light Goes Out
by Edmund Clark
‘When you are suspended by a rope you can recover but every time I see a rope I remember. If the light goes out
unexpectedly in a room, I am back in my cell.’
Binyam Mohamed, Prisoner #1458
This is a study of home, of a very particular idea of home at a very particular time in our history, and the lives of people whose paths crossed on 45 square miles of Cuba, cut off from the rest of the world by razor wire and water.
Rather than attempting to monumentalize the historical fact of the Guantanamo camps, this work explores three notions of home: The naval base at Guantanamo, home to the American community; the complex of detention camps on the naval base where detainees are held; and homes where former detainees now find themselves trying to rebuild their lives in Europe and the Middle East.
The series’ disjointed narrative aims to convey the sense of disorientation and dislocation central to the daily experience of incarceration at Guantanamo, and to explore the legacy of disturbance such experiences have in the minds and memories of these men. The viewer is asked to jump from prison camp detail to domestic still life; from life outside the naval base and back again – from light to dark.
The book includes an essay by Professor Julian Stallabrass of The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and texts by former Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Deghayes and Edmund Clark.
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