Single-channel video (color, sound, 13 min.)
The All-Hearing is a work about what and who defines noise in contemporary Cairo. So pervasive is loudspeaker libertarianism to Cairo’s daily life that hearing damage and noise pollution were immediately accepted as topics for a Friday sermon when Abu Hamdan suggested the idea to two Cairene sheikhs. Despite new laws established by the military government seeking to regulate sermons by restricting them to a weekly government-sanctioned topic, the sheikhs were determined to have the issue of noise heard. And it was indeed heard—not only by the congregation inside the mosque, but also by all those passersby who were barraged by the mosque’s loudspeakers broadcasting onto the streets outside.
The military crackdown on amplified voices in Cairo is in the name of policing noise and the lawless terrain
of the loudspeaker, yet it is in fact a means to direct the flow of voices away from espousing anything against the government. Hence on the day the sheikhs delivered their sermons on noise pollution as far as the ear could hear, all the other mosques in the surrounding area were explaining the Prophet’s ascension to heaven, the government-dictated topic of that week.
The All-Hearing was produced by the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands (2014).
