Sound at the Limits of Sense: Jordan Scott's "Lanterns at Guantanamo" and the Subversive Potential of Sound

After the publication of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s memoir "Guantanamo Diary" (2005), a window was opened into one of the most secretive places on Earth – Guantanamo Bay. This view, however, is obscured by countless redactions due to US censorship. Line after line is blacked out in a startlingly bare and obvious act of silencing. Proceeding from Slahi’s book, this paper will take Jordan Scott’s 2015 project “Lanterns at Guantanamo” as an artwork which attempts to resist the censor through its recording of ambient sound at Guantanamo as its primary medium. Sound exists, in Scott’s work, at the edges of the censor, and whilst Scott’s project does not grant an absolute freedom to record Guantanamo, it does provide potential strategies of resistance as the limits of the censor are confounded. Sound and silence, of course, retain strong significances in the context of Guantanamo and other secret US prisons (“black sites”) around the world, as such, this paper will also look at how sound and silence figure more generally in the so-called “war on terror” as a tool for coercion, interrogation, and control.