Please join us for a conversation about Guantánamo, art, and activism to celebrate the launch of conceptual documentary artist Debi Cornwall's new book, Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay. This event is hosted by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and co-sponsored by the DC Justice for Muslims Coalition and Witness Against Torture.
Welcome to Camp America is a vivid and disorienting glimpse into the U.S. Naval Station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and its growing diaspora of released men, through photographs, declassified archival material, and first-person texts. With unique construction and text in English and Arabic, the book seeks common ground while provoking questions about compromises made between law and illegality, and decency and fear in the post-9/11 "War on Terror" era.
CCR advocacy program manager Aliya Hussain will moderate an intimate conversation about Guantánamo and its contradictions with Debi Cornwall, Major Raashid Williams, a lawyer with the Military Commissions Defense Organization, and Dr. Maha Hilal, the inaugural Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and an organizer with Witness Against Torture.
About the Author:
Debi Cornwallis a conceptual documentary artist who returned to creative expression in 2014 after a 12-year career as a civil rights lawyer. Her work marries empathy and dark humor with systemic critique. She is a graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School, and practiced for more than a decade as a civil rights attorney representing innocent DNA exonerees. Informed by that experience, in 2014 she embarked on a three-year project to invite a renewed look at Guantánamo Bay and the men once held there, after they were cleared and freed. The result, Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay, is a book and exhibition combining photographs, archival materials, and first-person texts in English and Arabic.
Doors open at 6:00 p.m., and the event will begin at 6:30 p.m. Books will be available for sale. The event is free and open to the public, but please RSVP on the CCR website as space is limited.
