Zone d’attente 2008

Zone d’attente is a public art project commissioned by the French Cultural Center in Seoul. In this site-specific work of which the aim was the interchange of culture, but the French civil servants wanted me to decorate the walls in their own aesthetical way. So I first set one of my ongoing photograph-installation series as they liked in the space and a poem of people from Guantanamo camp as they didn’t like. So this project has been gone strange negotiation between a governmental power of abuse and a stubborn manner of the artist. I was interested in the detainees speak of people who were stayed in Guantanamo military prison where completely out of justice from all over the world. I juxtaposed the voice which doesn’t have a right to speak out on the window as if look like an air with the photograph-installation on the wall.

 

IS IT TRUE?
Osama Abu Kabir
Is it true that the grass grows again after rain?
Is it true that the flowers will rise up in the Spring?
It is true that birds will migrate home again?
Is it true that the salmon swim back up their stream?
It is true. This is true. These are all miracles.
But is it true that one day we’ll leave Guantanamo Bay?
Is it true that one day we’ll go back to our homes?
I sail in my dreams, I am dreaming of home.
To be with my children, each one part of me;
To be with my wife and the ones that I love;
To be with my parents, my world’s tenderest hearts.
I dream to be home, to be free from this cage.
But do you hear me, oh Judge, do you hear me at all?
We are innocent, here, we’ve committed no crime.
Set me free, set us free, if anywhere still
Justice and compassion remain in this world!

Poems from Guantanamo: the detainees speak, MIT Press, edited by Marc Falkoff, 2008