In January 2018, veteran actress Caroline Lagerfelt stepped into the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. She was there to see ‘Ode to the Sea’, an exhibition of artwork by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, which at that point had been open for 16 years, with no end in sight.
Lagerfelt had known about the atrocities committed at Guantanamo for some time. In fact, she had played British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce in a play about Guantanamo 14 years earlier, and became a staunch advocate of the facility’s closure. As she walked through the exhibition, she was stunned by the beauty and intricacy of the works—Moath al Alwi’s ‘meticulously crafted ship’ from bits of cardboard and other found materials within the detention facility, Muhammad Ansi’s painting of two hands grasping the bars of a prison window with flowers.[1] Ms Lagerfelt later recounted that ‘one of the most powerful paintings is Vertigo at Guantanamo by Ammar al Baluchi, a multi-coloured swirl that he painted to reflect the brain injury he suffered as a result of the brutal torture he underwent’.[2]
Vertigo at Guantanamo was, literally and figuratively, the product of years of torture, detention, interrogations, and ‘prosecution’ without end, all without basic medical or physical care. Ammar al Baluchi disappeared in Pakistan in April 2003. Soon thereafter, the CIA rendered him to the infamous ‘black sites’, where he would spend the next three and a half years entirely incommunicado, in violation of long standing international law.[3] His family had no idea where he was, and he had no news of them during that time. Former detainee Muhammad Ansi depicted the agony of incommunicado detention in his artwork.