Saydnaya (the Missing 19dB), 2017
Installation comprising a chromogenic print in a lightbox (243 × 30.5 × 10 cm), sound piece (12:48 min.) and automated mixing deck
In 2016, Abu Hamdan started working with Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture to produce an acoustic investigation into the Assad-regime prison of Saydnaya, twenty-five kilometers north of Damascus in Syria, where more than thirteen thousand people have been executed since protests in that country began in 2011. The prison is inaccessible to independent observers and monitors, and so the memories of those few who have been released are the only resource available from which to learn of and document the viola- tions taking place there. Their capacity to see anything in Saydnaya was highly restricted; they were kept in darkness, blindfolded, or made to cover their eyes, and thus they developed an acute sensitivity to sound. Abu Hamdan worked with survivors’ earwitness testimonies to help reconstruct the prison’s architecture and gain insight as to what happens inside.
The installation is an automated scenography containing a sound work and a lightbox. The sound piece is played back in a darkened room containing a dimly lit mixing deck/soundboard on which the volume controls are motorized and autonomously move according to the voices one is hearing in the room. The lightbox, which turns on toward the very end of the work, suddenly illuminating the room, documents the ways in which the whispers of inmates became four times quieter after the 2011 protests began: it shows a decreasing sound level, from right to left, of a voice speaking at normal conversational volume, a voice demonstrating the level at which one could speak in Saydnaya before 2011, and finally the level at which one could speak in Saydnaya after 2011.
In the absence of any other material evidence, the nineteen-decibel drop in the capacity to speak stands as testament to the transformation of Saydnaya from a prison to a death camp. In these nineteen decibels we can hear the disappearance of voice, and the voices of the disappeared.
This work was commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE (2017).
