Soldered brass, 12 x 10 x 7, 2008.
The tondo is the round devotional picture of Renaissance Florence, made for the home and given most often to the Virgin and Child. Its subject sat at the center of the circle to be venerated, and the frame was commonly a garland of flowers and fruit. Gitmo Tondo keeps the circle and the garland. A flower with leaves opens at the right, a scalloped fan spreads along the lower edge, and a flat insect sits at the upper left. At the center, in the Madonna’s place, is a hooded figure.
Guantánamo Bay is the US detention camp opened in 2002 for prisoners taken in the war on terror. The administration called them “enemy combatants” and falsely claimed that the Geneva Conventions and the US courts did not reach them. That claim was legally wrong, and the camp became the site of treatment that violated the prohibition on torture. Most of the men held there were never charged with a crime. The images that defined the camp showed prisoners kneeling in orange jumpsuits, shackled, with goggles, mittens and face coverings. Hooding withheld the face, and the photographs circulated anyway.
The tondo form turns those photographs into a devotional object. A tondo presents an image for sustained looking, and this image was made to be looked at by the whole world. The Virgin’s veil marks holiness. The hood sits in the same position and marks the opposite. The garland stays in full bloom around a figure whose face is covered.
A circle has no corners and no exit, and detention without charge has no term. A concentric disc sits against the hooded head at roughly the position of the eye, and it reads as a lens or a dial. From behind, the circle is a shallow shell on a bolted handle and two short feet. The front is garlanded for display, and the back is the hardware that props the picture up.
