A Sea Without a Shore: Toward Building an Alternative Visual Archive of Guantánamo Bay

This chapter explores the role that art made by Guantánamo Bay detainee Moath al-Alwi plays in building an alternative visual archive of the detention camp. It asks: How can art made under such circumstances both reveal and challenge the conditions of possibility that both form and sustain the camp? I argue that Moath’s art offers powerful moments of counter-visualization that disrupt the visual archiving work of the state, where this visual archive is central to the structures and forms of violence that characterize the detention camp. Moath’s boats mount and build an alternative visual archive of the camp that ruptures the complicity of the visual to power, and in doing so, seizes a right to look, to see, and to be seen.