This is a photograph of Saydnaya (the missing 19db), by Lawrence Abu Hamdan.
I saw this work at the Turner Prize Exhibition in 2019, in Margate. It was a few months before I flew to Lebanon to revisit Bar Elias. No two places could be so different. But Lawrence Abu Hamdan describes himself as an 'ear witness', and I had just defended my PhD proposal and fieldwork methodology, in which I proposed to make 'soundscapes' of Bar Elias. I was intrigued how he would use sound to generate testimony about a place.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan's multi-media efforts to tell a truth about the Saydnaya Prison in Syria have all taken place far from the Syrian borders, in Beirut, Berlin, and probably in the UK and US. However, his efforts are obsessively oriented towards this particular place - a prison located 25 kilometres north of Damascus. Working at a distance, with an absence of images and eyewitness accounts (all prisoners were blindfolded), Abu Hamdan relies on the affordances of sounds.
Sound 'leaks', he says. He was referring to the sounds made throughout the prison, which could be heard through concrete walls. Aural leakages indicate the porosity of concrete walls which divided prison cells. They connected prisoners with other prisoners and with guards, and even with the landscape outside of the prison walls. They became a reference for time and space for prisoners, who learned to listen and to locate sounds for different times of the day and different parts of the prison.
But Abu Hamdan's work shows us that sounds can also leak from the prison, from the Regime in Syria, into studios in East Berlin, rooms in Beirut, wherever Abu Hamdan was were he interviewed former prisoners, wherever he re-created the sounds they described, wherever he exhibited his work.
Of course it is true that the first sound, the origin sound, like the clink of coffee cups or the footsteps of a guard, have long dissipated. And yet, something of them remains in circulation. These origin sounds have been translated and transformed as they have leaked across these spatio-temporalities. Prisoners' 'acoustic memories' (Hamdan) have been translated into language - 'yes', 'no', 'not that loud', 'slightly more dull' - as prisoner and artist attempted to mimic the remembered sound using everyday objects. These negotiations have been translated into English subtitles. Through their collective efforts, prisoners' acoustic memories have been transformed into cinematic FX. And, in Saydnaya (the missing 19db), the origin sounds have been mimicked by the prisoners, and then transformed into an image.
These acts of translation and transformation are acts of effort and attentiveness. The origin sound has dissipated, the acoustic memory will be lost with the former prisoners' fading memories, but some element of the first sound - through acts of translation and transformation - remains. These acts of effort and attentiveness have allowed sound to continue to create a sense of place, a sense of Saydnaya Prison, within and across people who are situated miles away.
In this visualising ethnography, we are often encouraged to think about the power of images (to evoke feelings, to communicate information, etc.). But perhaps toxicities - corrosive, decaying affects/afflictions (Liboiron, Tironi, Calvillo, 2018), 'amorphous menaces' (Nixon, 2011) - are best approached via the medium of sound. Toxicities defy efforts to fix in place. They can only be gestured towards. They shift, dissipate, transform. Like sound. Sound resists fixation, and perfect translation into another media (Hafeda, 2019). In the case of Abu Hamad, the final work is visual, but it explicitly references what is missing - sound.
This is not to say that efforts to visualise ethnography are doomed, or that visuals are always haunted by what they lack, but that attending to sound and its interplay with image can support an understanding of how we can methodologically approach toxicity. If both mediums can be seen as gestural, then their power is not in capturing a reality or truth, but in supporting or enduring it. It is in recognising mediums as gestural that we open up this conversation to the sphere of ethics (Agamben, 2000) - of what ought to be endured and supported and communicated, which does not transcend but exposes itself as being a means, enmeshed in the flows of toxicities.
This is a photograph of Saydnaya (the missing 19db), by Lawrence Abu Hamdan.
I saw this work at the Turner Prize Exhibition in 2019, in Margate. It was a few months before I flew to Lebanon to revisit Bar Elias. No two places could be so different. But Lawrence Abu Hamdan describes himself as an 'ear witness', and I had just defended my PhD proposal and fieldwork methodology, in which I proposed to make 'soundscapes' of Bar Elias. I was intrigued how he would use sound to generate testimony about a place.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan's multi-media efforts to tell a truth about the Saydnaya Prison in Syria have all taken place far from the Syrian borders, in Beirut, Berlin, and probably in the UK and US. However, his efforts are obsessively oriented towards this particular place - a prison located 25 kilometres north of Damascus. Working at a distance, with an absence of images and eyewitness accounts (all prisoners were blindfolded), Abu Hamdan relies on the affordances of sounds.
Sound 'leaks', he says. He was referring to the sounds made throughout the prison, which could be heard through concrete walls. Aural leakages indicate the porosity of concrete walls which divided prison cells. They connected prisoners with other prisoners and with guards, and even with the landscape outside of the prison walls. They became a reference for time and space for prisoners, who learned to listen and to locate sounds for different times of the day and different parts of the prison.
But Abu Hamdan's work shows us that sounds can also leak from the prison, from the Regime in Syria, into studios in East Berlin, rooms in Beirut, wherever Abu Hamdan was were he interviewed former prisoners, wherever he re-created the sounds they described, wherever he exhibited his work.
Of course it is true that the first sound, the origin sound, like the clink of coffee cups or the footsteps of a guard, have long dissipated. And yet, something of them remains in circulation. These origin sounds have been translated and transformed as they have leaked across these spatio-temporalities. Prisoners' 'acoustic memories' (Hamdan) have been translated into language - 'yes', 'no', 'not that loud', 'slightly more dull' - as prisoner and artist attempted to mimic the remembered sound using everyday objects. These negotiations have been translated into English subtitles. Through their collective efforts, prisoners' acoustic memories have been transformed into cinematic FX. And, in Saydnaya (the missing 19db), the origin sounds have been mimicked by the prisoners, and then transformed into an image.
These acts of translation and transformation are acts of effort and attentiveness. The origin sound has dissipated, the acoustic memory will be lost with the former prisoners' fading memories, but some element of the first sound - through acts of translation and transformation - remains. These acts of effort and attentiveness have allowed sound to continue to create a sense of place, a sense of Saydnaya Prison, within and across people who are situated miles away.
In this visualising ethnography, we are often encouraged to think about the power of images (to evoke feelings, to communicate information, etc.). But perhaps toxicities - corrosive, decaying affects/afflictions (Liboiron, Tironi, Calvillo, 2018), 'amorphous menaces' (Nixon, 2011) - are best approached via the medium of sound. Toxicities defy efforts to fix in place. They can only be gestured towards. They shift, dissipate, transform. Like sound. Sound resists fixation, and perfect translation into another media (Hafeda, 2019). In the case of Abu Hamad, the final work is visual, but it explicitly references what is missing - sound.
This is not to say that efforts to visualise ethnography are doomed, or that visuals are always haunted by what they lack, but that attending to sound and its interplay with image can support an understanding of how we can methodologically approach toxicity. If both mediums can be seen as gestural, then their power is not in capturing a reality or truth, but in supporting or enduring it. It is in recognising mediums as gestural that we open up this conversation to the sphere of ethics (Agamben, 2000) - of what ought to be endured and supported and communicated, which does not transcend but exposes itself as being a means, enmeshed in the flows of toxicities.