Textual description of the project called:
"Guantanamo: a typographic point of view".
A project by Youssef Shoufan.
(return to omanatnaug.com)
After twisting and transforming people from all over the world, I decided to give Guantanamo's detention camp the same treatment, but graphically.
Here are 5 concepts playing with the word Guantanamo.
The vertical parts of the letters "u, n, t, n and m" were stretched to the top and bottom so the word is now behind prison bars. And since these lines are separated with unequal distances, they also look as a codebar.
Guantanámera is a woman from Guantánamo, Cuba, but also a famous song. I played with words saying it was an infamous prison, but putting a stroke on the "in" of "infamous" so it becomes "famous", and another stroke on "pri" from "prison", so it becomes "song" after adding the letter "g".
Someone is playing hangman, the famous game where you have guess a word by finding the letters one by one. Here, everything is completed, except for the letter "t". We can guess that the missing letter is "t", and then realize that the letters that were tried but weren't used were: "respec". Is there respect in Guantanamo?
On January 22nd, 2009, the White House said it would close Guantánamo in one year, right after Barack Obama was elected president of the United States of America. That didn't happen.
So I combined the words Guantanamo and Obama, creating "Guantanamobama". I then added the famous "Yes we can" slogan, and in parenthesis: (break promises).
Imagine yourself on the other side of Guantanamo. The word. As if you were seeing it in a mirror: "omanatnaug". The four first letters are now "oman". Cut the "n" in half and you get an "r", which makes the 4 first letters "Omar".
Omar Khadr, accused at 16, "liberated" at 26, imprisoned for life.