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Add to My Collection
Welcome to Guantanamo Museum
2008
Black and white prints, mock-ups, audio, table and vinyls
Dimensions: Variable dimensions
8 photographs: 66 x 83.5 x 4 cm each
Reference: ACF0075
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Turning Guantanamo, the American prison on the island of Cuba, into a museum is the proposal that Alicia Framis makes in order to reflect on the exaggerated current tendency to commemorate and preserve the memory of any event in our world. The museum stagings of the horror of Nazi concentration camps or of prisons like Alcatraz, are some examples. Framis’s proposal includes two pavilions entitled «Cosas para olvidar (Things to forget)» and «Pabellón de las mentiras (Pavilion of lies)», poetically approaching this doubt between preserving the memory of the misery of our society, like that of the black hole of our time, or leaving it to be forgotten.
This installation is the first sketch that the artist has undertaken for the project of this hypothetical museum. It is made up of scale models, drawings and objects (a chaise-longue as an electric chair, boots that conceal a suicide pill, a torture helmet, etc.) and an audio exercpt in which the writer Enrique Vila-Matas has collaborated, which has composed the musical order of the 274 names of the prisoners in Guantanamo, and the German singer Blixa Bargeld, who recites them in a deep voice with a penitential rhythm. The designer Alex Guifreu has also collaborated in the work by inventing the museum’s typography.
