Gallery: Cups

This installation is inspired by the Poets of Guantanamo who in the first year of their detention were not allowed writing materials. Undeterred poems were composed on Styrofoam cups using pebbles. The poems were passed from cell to cell.

When the guards discovered what was going on, they smashed the cups and threw them away fearing it was a way of passing coded messages.

Fragments of these "cup poems" survived and are included in the anthology Poems from Guantanamo – The Detainees Speak., Mark Falcoff, (ed), published by University of Iowa Press.

Iowa Press have granted me permission to use quotes from this book.

I have fragmented the poems by way of reflecting the original fragments of the "cup poems" which survived – hopefully a metaphor for the survival of hope for detainees past and present.