Vinyl wall prints (timeline: 205 × 267 cm) and takeaway printed A4 sheets on a shelf
In September 2012, Abu Hamdan held a meeting in Utrecht to discuss a controversial topic: the phonetic policies that govern the acceptance or rejection of migrant asylum applications in different European countries. The group consisted of twelve Somali citizens who had been subjected to an analysis of language and accent by the Dutch system of migratory control and whose applications had been rejected, as well as linguists, researchers, activists, cultural organizations, and the graphic designer Janna Ulrich.
The diagrams made by Ulrich as the result of this encounter are responses to the unilateral outcome of the rejection of asylum: they offer a silent protest—purely visual—to the involuntary manifestation that the Somalis’ voices had suffered. The diagram’s density reflects the complex task of recording in these voices biographies of hunger and conflict; the necessary adaptation of capacities of oral communication during long migratory journeys; and the vital obligation of hybridization and contamination during years in overcrowded refugee camps. The complexity of these maps is a performance of the irreducibility of the voice to a passport, and its inapplicability to fix people in space.
These diagrams prompt us to rethink how borders are made perceptible in configurations of vowels and consonants transformed into a legal responsibility that the artist attempts to complicate and dismantle.
This work was commissioned by Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht. Among different art institutions the work has been exhibited in various spaces for refugee organizations in Europe. The maps were presented by the asylum seekers to a Dutch immigration judge and during a deportation hearing in a British asylum court.
