The British-Lebanese artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan uses sounds to reconstruct human rights crimes against Syrian prisoners. A conversation about the sound of hunger, distorted memories and trauma.
You describe yourself as a “private ear”, which could be translated into German as an “acoustic private detective”. How did you get into this unusual job?
On the one hand I have always worked with sound and on the other hand I dealt with forensics during my studies. As part of my doctorate in forensic linguistics, I got to know the greats of the subject. When I wanted to start my first investigation project on behalf of an NGO – it was about shooting at two Palestinian youths during a demonstration – I asked these experts for their support. But they told me that they only worked for the police and did not investigate outside of state forensics. That’s when I realized that there was a huge void in terms of state violence. So I started my work as a “private ear” with a focus on human rights issues.
They use clay artistically and investigatively to solve human rights violations. In 2016, together with Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture, you reconstructed the Syrian military prison Saydnaya, which is said to have been subjected to systematic torture and mass executions. How did you go about it?
Saydnaya was my most difficult research to date, but also the one from which I learned the most: about the relationship between tone and violence and about the way we remember tone. Because most of the prisoners were blindfolded and kept in the dark, we built the prison based on what they heard.
To do this, you spoke to six former prisoners. How could they put their acoustic memories into words?
Clay does not have a language of its own to describe it. We call it bright or sharp, for example, so we borrow terms from other senses. In order to find out from the prisoners what they heard in Saydnaya, I had to get creative. For example, I used objects to imitate sounds at different volumes. A witness was able to identify noises made by the cell door locks, from which we deduced how many people were being held in his corridor. We later compared this information with statements from prisoners who were held in the same hallway.
Isn’t it re-traumatizing for prisoners to listen to such noises?
Quite the opposite: psychologists and trauma experts tell us that it is the most traumatizing thing for Witnesses to be asked to recapitulate what happened on their own. The person has to imagine everything himself, to go into this room all by himself. We didn’t say, “Close your eyes and go back to the place,” but played sounds. In doing so, we allowed the Witnesses to use these details to retrieve the memories instead of searching for them themselves. Instead of bringing them closer, we created distance between them and the prison by making it an object: they could see it, hear it, touch it on a screen.
In addition to the noises in the prison, silence also played an important role. How could you make this tangible?
Silence was brutally implemented in Saydnaya. The prisoners were not allowed to make a sound even if they were tortured. Silence was the first thing they were commanded to do, and it was the last thing that made them fail and lose their lives as a result. For example, it happened that someone coughed and was fatally punished for it. I see silence as a form of abuse in its own right. I wanted to understand it as much as one would examine any other weapon and the damage it does. I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing this silence.
To person
Lawrence Abu Hamdan(35) is a Lebanese-British artist. He studied Sonic Arts in London and then did a PhD in the history of forensic linguistics from Goldsmiths College of Fine Arts, London University. Today he lives in Dubai. Abu Hamdan worked with non-governmental organizations to put his acoustic investigations in the service of human rights.
With the practice of European asylum authoritiesHe dealt critically in 2012: The authorities analyzed the dialects of asylum seekers in order to determine their origin and deport them based on this. Together with a team of activists, refugees and linguists, Abu Hamdan created a map to show the ambiguity of language and identity. The work “The Freedom of Speech Itself” was exhibited in art museums and also used as evidence at a deportation hearing in Great Britain.
On behalf of the organizationDefense for Children International researched Abu Hamdan in 2014 into the case of two Palestinian youths who had been shot by Israeli soldiers during a demonstration. With the help of an acoustic analysis, he was able to prove that the soldiers had used live ammunition and not rubber bullets, as they claimed. He then dealt with this investigation artistically in his work “Earshot”.
In his workAbu Hamdan also regularly deals critically with state surveillance. Most famous, however, is his investigation into the Syrian torture prison Saydnaya, which he began together with Forensic Architecture and Amnesty International in 2016. For this work he was awarded the renowned Turner Prize in 2019
Saydnaya prison
. North of the Syrian capital Damascusis the Saydnaya military prison. It was built in the 1980s by Hafiz al-Assad based on the German model. It should be a “humane prison”, with cells above ground, fresh air and enough space for the inmates to move around. In the 2000s and especially since the beginning of the mass protests in Syria in 2011, however, it has become the epitome of the Syrian machinery of torture and killing under President Bashar al-Assad.
Amnesty International said Saydnaya in a report as a “slaughterhouse for people.” According to the organization, there have been mass executions of political prisoners there since the beginning of the Syrian revolution. At least 13,000 people are said to have been hanged between 2011 and 2015, and according to Syrian human rights organizations, more than 10,000 people are still imprisoned in Saydnaya.
You discovered, for example, that the volume at which prisoners were allowed to converse in Saydnaya had fallen by 19 decibels after the start of the Syrian revolution. To do this, you compared the statements of prisoners before and after 2011. How did you proceed?
First I asked them to repeat the volume at which they had spoken. But I was unsuccessful with that, because they were very different from each other. So instead I asked them to remember the volume at which others had spoken to them. I played a note, made it quieter and you should tell where it sounded right. The witnesses were then all less than five decibels apart, which is extremely accurate.
Two former Syrian secret service employees recently stood on trial in Koblenz for crimes against humanity. In this trial, too, numerous witnesses reported about their experiences in a secret service prison, where they were only allowed to leave the cells with blindfolds. Why aren’t analytics like yours used to gather evidence in such processes?
I believe our methods are very truthful. This was also confirmed in retrospect when we compared our results with statements from former guards. But they just don’t meet the standards that a court uses to collect evidence in criminal proceedings. In our research we learned a lot of forensically valid facts. But some of the most telling testimonies were those in which witnesses described distorted memories.
What do you mean by that?
We tried to find out how close he was to the main door of a witness named Samer. So I played the sound of a big door and Samer kept telling me to make the sound louder. At some point it was so loud that it couldn’t possibly have been the actual volume of the door. It sounded more like a car accident. Then Samer said that this was not how the door sounded, but the bread when it was thrown in front of his cell door in the morning. Such evidence cannot be presented in a courtroom.
What he says is impossible: that the sound of bread falling on the floor is as loud as a car accident.
Exactly. But I understood a lot about the prison at the time. It’s not about the noises the prisoners heard there, but what they meant to them: in this case, that they were hungry, that they were in the dark, and that it was quiet. One tiny sound described Samer as the loudest. His statement is biased, but it is precisely this bias that is evidence of extreme malnutrition. If we have the right instruments, we can hear hunger.
The results of your work did not end up in the courtroom, but were exhibited in renowned art museums and at biennials. How does a Syrian torture prison fit into a gallery?
The experiences from prison must become visible, audible and understandable. I wanted to continue the project in an artistic space because the people there are used to silence, abstraction and distortion. They have known that since impressionism at the latest. Therefore, the audience is able to hear statements that don’t work elsewhere.
Interview: Hannah El-Hitami
