with Aaron Hughes

Taking as its starting point the curious love story of a Guantanamo Bay guard who fell in love with the drawings on the Styrofoam cups carved by detainees, the Tea Project is an ongoing series of exhibitions and performances that offers counter-narratives to disrupt the numbing effects of war and detention. Through the Tea Project, Ginsburg and Hughes create scenarios that allow audiences a role in telling the story of our current involvement in war and torture.

THE CUPS

The installation houses 779 porcelain cast Styrofoam cups, one for each individual detained in ultra legal detention in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp since 2001. Inspired by accounts of Guantanamo Bay detainees drawing flowers on Styrofoam cups, each cup is inscribed with a national or a native flowers from the forty-nine countries of citizenship held in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. The cups are stories told in flowers and numbers. If there are 220 flowers on a cup, as there are for Afghanistan, then 220 men have been detained and there are 220 cups on display. On the bottom of each up is the name of one detained man and his country of citizenship.

This installation and the 779 cups were produced with the support of the The Lawrence Arts Center, Lawrence, Kansas.