The Built Environments of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba and ‘The Pretend Villages of Afghanistan and Iraq

Join us for an artist lecture and slide presentation by Christopher Sims (American, born 1972), Undergraduate Education Director, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and he takes us through two of his projects the documents the built environments of the U.S. naval station at Guantánamo Bay as well as unique training facilities on other U.S. military bases.

About the Projects: “Guantánamo Bay”

In 2006 and 2010, I traveled by plane, ferry, and bus to the naval base and joint detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
On this small spit of land, on approximately 45 square miles held in a perpetual lease by the U.S. military, actors from the world stage converge: American interrogators attempt to wrest information from Muslim “unlawful enemy combatants”; Jamaican and Filipino guest workers are imported by contractors to serve food, cut hair at the barbershop, and wash the laundry; and on the base’s residential streets that resemble an American suburb, a handful of Cuban families who fled Castro’s takeover of the island live out their days in exile. Against this backdrop, there are also strikingly mundane activities that take place: children go to school, guards pick up coffee at McDonald’s and Starbucks, and backyard barbeques are planned.

Restrictions by the military made making photographs of people at GTMO impractical, so I chose instead to photograph the environments that people create and inhabit rather than the people themselves, the stage sets rather than the players.

About the Projects: “The Pretend Villages of Iraq and Afghanistan”

For almost ten years, I have been making photographs within fictitious Iraqi and Afghan villages on the training grounds of U.S. Army bases. The villages are situated in the deep forests of North Carolina and Louisiana, and each base features clusters of villages spread out over thousands of acres.

The villages serve as a strange and poignant way station for people heading off to war and for those who have fled it. U.S. soldiers interact with pretend villagers who are often recent immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan, who have now found work in the American South playing a version of the lives they left behind and who are unexpectedly pioneering a new form of cultural guest work.

About the Artist:

Christopher Sims was born in Michigan and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He has an undergraduate degree in history from Duke University, a master’s degree in visual communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a M.F.A. in studio art from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He worked as a photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and currently is the Undergraduate Education Director at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

His recent exhibitions include shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Houston Center for Photography, the Light Factory, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. His project on Guantanamo Bay was featured in The Washington Post, the BBC World Service, Roll Call, and Flavorwire. He was selected as the recipient of the Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers in 2010 and named one of the "new Superstars of Southern Art" by the Oxford American magazine in 2012.

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Photograph: “Club Survivor, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. 2006.”