“…Saydnaya, the Syrian regime’s prison, 30 kilometers north of Damascus. This prison itself remains inaccessible to independent observers and monitors, and as people are still held inside, it’s strictly controlled what kind of image we have of this place. And this satellite image is as far as we can, as close as we can get to seeing the space.
Moreover, the ability for the survivors and former detainees to testify is severely handicapped as they were kept in darkness, never left the confines of their room for the majority of their sentence, or they were blindfolded as they were moved through the corridors and stairwells. Survivors, mostly anti-government activists of the prison who have been released to tell the tale, are therefore mostly able to give ear witness testimony to the prison and to the violations taking place there. Leading the audio component of a larger team of investigators from Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths College and Amnesty International, my task was to investigate what was happening inside the prison and reconstruct its architecture through acoustics, and those were done through kind of special ear witness interviews I did with the witnesses.
Listening in Saydnaya is both the means through which one witnesses what was happening there, and to a large part, a means to survive. Give one example. Wherever the guards look through the door latch into the overcrowded cells, each of the inmates must be kneeling facing the wall and covering their eyes with their hands. The guards, however, would try to catch them out of this mandatory position by creeping up on them, and if they catch them out of this position, they will be tortured and beaten sometimes to death. So listening and identifying the smallest shuffles of the guards’ footsteps or the turning of a key very quietly in the lock at the far end of a corridor could save one’s life and the life of one’s inmates. So, the will to survive was the will to listen.
The better one could listen, the better chances they had of survival and living to testify to what one heard. As part of my interview process, I used sound artifacts to simulate sounds such as doors, locks, and footsteps that were used to generate acoustic memories and discourse around the place. I also got witnesses to listen to tones like you would in a hearing test, and I asked them to match the volume of the tone with the levels of specific incidents inside the prison to understand the state of silence they were forced to inhabit.
Can you hear the sound of the shoes of the guards? Were they fast, the guards? Very fast. Faster than that? Like this? Like someone who’s walking on floor. His feet barely touched the ground. Can you tell me the level of the sound of the guards’ footsteps as he was not walking, but… Creeping. Creeping, right. So when we reach the correct volume, when we lower the volume, that’s it. Well, that’s it. It’s such a tiny sound. Of course, we can only hear them coming when there’s no other sound. If there’s a silent guard, you won’t hear him. My hearing is now a third of what it was since I’ve been in Saydnaya for a long time. And you’re the expert in sound, aren’t you? I think the sound was even lower than that. Saydnaya has been polluted more than it was in Saydnaya. So maybe I’m remembering the sound as louder than it truly was.
Speech in Saydnaya is punishable by death and even if you were being beaten, it is forbidden for you to make a sound. At the times when the guards were in closest proximity to these witnesses, the detainees were afraid to audibly move in the city or even scratch an itch.
Those too sick to suppress a cough break the violently enforced silence and suffer potentially fatal consequences. So, the silence becomes testimony in itself to the uninhabitable conditions of Saydnaya’s overcrowded cells and the silence is a form of torture in and of itself. The level at which detainees could whisper and not be heard by the guards through the doors, walls, water pipes and ventilation systems is a measure of the silence at Saydnaya.
The whisper maps the threshold of audibility. The border between whisper and speech, between sound and silence is the border between life and death. So I asked each of the survivors to listen to the sound of a test tone and to match the tone with the level at which they could speak to one another in their cells.
A barely audible tone of whisper about there was consistent among Salam, Samar and Jamal but Diab’s whisper was 19 decibels greater the equivalent of being 4 times louder than the rest. Diab’s whisper was 19 decibels louder than the rest because he was released in 2011 when all the inmates of Saydnaya were freed in order to use the prison exclusively for the political protesters that were starting a revolution across the country. As a response to these protests in 2011 a new era of extreme violence and terror took hold at Saydnaya a mass murder that can be measured in whispers.
The 19 decibel drop in the capacity for inmates to whisper is a measure of the huge increase in violence at Saydnayasince 2011 A 19 decibel increase in violence that has resulted in the killing of 17,000 people either by execution, hunger, thirst or untreated illnesses. A 19 decibel drop in whispers that allows us to hear loud and clear the transformation of Saydnaya from a prison into a death camp. So without a breath to carry their voice speech with the inmates despite the darkness became a predominantly visual experience.
Even though their hearing was more fine tuned and acute than it had ever been in their lives they were deaf when it came to communicating between each other in the cells. In order to speak to each other they relied on lip reading and hand gestures and a small kind of consonant led speech which is based more on the consonants than the vowels. The vowels almost completely disappeared in the whispers that they demonstrated to me.
Sound became sight and sight became sound as entire images and scenes of the prison are built from the sounds around them. This is one of the 3D models based on a very clear image that Samer had in his mind just from hearing the space. You can imagine that he mapped this space just by sound so for example the number of cells he was very certain about because each lock he heard every day so he would just count the locks and would try and estimate from that how many people were in the prison.
This is why the silence has incidentally become one of the things that allowed their memories to retain such a high resolution because they were in this constantly hyper-attentive state and in very silent conditions it meant that every sound was registered and remembered and gave them kind of expert testimony instead of victims as you would understand them normally.
In fact new technologies of surveillance are already creating a future where there will no longer be a sight/sound division where the sensory notions of touch, sound and sight are convolved into one. And this is actually an image from the near future a CCTV camera angle monitoring a series of supermarket aisles based on an experiment that the researchers at MIT have done so the science here is that when your voice is propelled from your mouth through the air it hits objects in your vicinity and causes tiny vibrations on the surfaces of those objects at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a group of computer scientists have discovered that by video recording an object using high speed cameras they can extract those minute vibrations and recover the sound that produced them this gives them the ability to turn everyday objects such as a packet of crisps a glass of water or a potted plant into a box of tissues or a listening device what they call visual microphones so if you imagine that this would be although this technology is not yet implemented by the NSA, GCHQ and other spying agencies in this CCTV image of a supermarket you see all the objects in color that can to date be successfully used as sound recording devices.
Inversely the black and white sections of the map reveal all the objects of the map that cannot yet be used as microphones and therefore show the silent or blind spots of this technology so if you want to hold a private conversation you go to aisle 11 because that’s mostly kind of hard tinned objects without too much moving paper the objects that are shown in color are able to listen to you and record your voice yet they will never give a crystal clear quality of sound reproduction due to their individual material form each of these objects has its own way of hearing the world and coloring the recording it makes for the inventors of this technology the most perplexing and intriguing part of this discovery is the texture that each object adds to a recording and they think that each object has a kind of individual voice they know that the future of surveillance will be recording our voices using minute vibrations of objects that surround us but a future yet to be imagined will come from listening closely to what the objects themselves have to say so the inventor of this technology was called Abe Davis and he told me in an interview that you’re hearing from the perspective of the object or almost feeling from the perspective of the object because when we think about hearing we think of the frequencies that are coming to us from where we are and for the object it’s not just a matter of what those frequencies are it’s also a matter of what frequency the object responds to and this tells you a lot about the object so it’s almost like when you’re at a concert and there’s very loud music playing there might be loud music across all the frequencies but what you feel in your chest is the bass kick and objects have a similar experience in some ways where there are certain frequencies they’re just built to respond to so for example the packet of potato chips is today the most faithful of all recording devices because it’s kind of like the object like we’re built for the bass drum the potato chip is built for kind of human speech so that’s a potato chip packet recording Mary Had a Little Lamb.
And this is how a tissue is recording the same sound so you see that the tissue is kind of built for another world it’s not attuned to speech it’s not something we get being able to speak to but it’s kind of listening in a different way in a kind of bassy mess so likewise the ear witnesses of Said Naya knew very well that nothing looked the way it sounded or sounded the way it looked and in order to be able to accurately reconstruct and objectify the place in which all but its violence was hidden from them they tasked me with the recreation of specific sounds that they had committed to memory but it wasn’t only the sounds that they had committed to memory it was the way in which these sounds should be reproduced so to recreate the beatings as they echoed in their minds it meant me following specific instructions that pertained to all kinds of material that I should strike which included plaster walls vintage woolen mattresses plastic bags filled with cotton old leather handbags etc in order to capture a sound that was particularly latent in Jamal’s recollection of Said Naya was the killing of hundreds of lice in which the cells were infested in order to do this he said you must buy a packet of sunflower seeds and break the shell between your fingers into a microphone so he then went on to say we used to distinguish between the tools of torture some of them sound like a big hammer breaking down a wall others like a whipping sound like a belt or something some like a really big tool tearing up the wall so yes every tool has a different sound the loudest was the dulab and the worst one which shook the walls was the stick you could hear that on the third floor because the walls were shaking from the echo and what’s kind of striking is that in the above extract of Jamal’s testimony we see how he describes the sounds of the beatings not as a violence perpetrated against humans or even bodies but rather perpetrated against the architecture itself .
He speaks as if the walls of the prison were the victims of the torture breaking down a wall, tearing up a wall and the worst one which shook the walls the detainees became kind of continuous with the architectural fabric of the prison they were not the subjects of the violence perpetrated inside but they rather became the walls the membrane of the prison became kind of quasi-organic it grew into their bodies in some way that meant that they were constantly kind of connected to it by a vibration and because they had to be so careful to listen to every sound and where it was coming from it meant that the walls of the prison gave them the kind of capacity to hear and feel across the entire surface of the prison it extended their tympanum across the walls and made them alert to all that vibrated inside the compound wherever in this prison a detainee was being beaten they were also beating on the eardrum of everybody because there is no voice sound permitted inside Naya the vibration of each violent act echoed throughout the prison and was felt on the surface of the body of the beaten and as a violation of the acoustic space of all the bodies who became unwillingly included in the event of its vibration so to understand a bit more about this feeling that I got from them and these testimonies I began looking at the prison in a different way. I used a software that actually ray traced all the reflections of the sound throughout the building and shows how sound propagates and bounces off the surfaces and it gives a very different image of incarceration where we might usually think of a kind of bounded box where we’re inside where the limits of our visuality stop and that’s what a claustrophobic idea of incarceration is but perhaps what’s more frightening is an idea that you through sound are kind of constantly connected to the building that every sound echoes through the building and so every sound is part of the prison and carries with it the sound of incarceration and so what it also meant is what demanded documentation was not only the acoustics of the place but a kind of conflation between acoustics and them as listeners and their kind of psychological state so that was how we could start to kind of get to the experience and to understand exactly what kind of violation is being done to them and so they’re intertwined in the communication of that place is not only architecture but the ways in which the architecture of Saydnaya becomes conjoined with the victims through sound one such example came from an interview I conducted with Samer while we were attempting to reconstruct the sound of the main door in Saydnaya I began playing with Foley sounds the sound effects of metal doors in order of their ascending intensity none of the door sounds I was playing back satisfied Samer’s acoustic memory and he kept telling me to raise the amplitude of the sound the sounds were getting larger and larger and finally when we played back the sound of a huge slamming metal door which had a kind of unrealistically large reverberation time Samer was taken aback he paused and he told me that this was the exact sound not of the door but rather the sound of the food box being dropped on the ground at the end of the corridor the laws of physics would tell us that it is impossible for a box landing on the ground to make such a vast sound and yet it wasn’t the laws of physics that were at work here Samer’s complete conviction that this was the precise sound of the arrival of food made me understand that we were not talking about the intensity of sound but we were inadvertently speaking about the intensity of hunger this sound became a conduit for something that although technically was sayable, we didn’t eat for seven days, was nevertheless somehow made more measurable in the scale of its impression on the human sensorium and these moments of cross sensory memory distortions where hunger was remembered as a sound and the sound of a closing door came to mean food were rare but extremely articulate about the ways in which the trauma manifested itself and like sound leaks across the cortex between haptic, somatic, sonic and visual boundaries that we are conventionally able to compartmentalize these moments where human memory architecture, violence, reconstruction all got entangled in a way that does not allow an easy separation of subject and object, testimony and evidence matter and memory they provoke a fragile truth that we must insist on as an evidence despite their juridical impossibility.
However, it is only in understanding how they have lived as listeners in Saydnaya and how those sounds persist and bleed into their lives after they were released will we expand the notion of the war crime itself the distortions in memory are as much proof as the forensic evidence because they may be biased, subjective and not applicable to juridical language but they provide us with the overwhelming evidence that there was not only violence done to their bodies but also allows us to measure the extent of the destruction done to their memories we also must insist on these fragile truths because language itself was severely tested throughout this process language is at a loss for the double reason that both violence pain and sound are extremely hard to find adequate verbal representation like the description of taste, sound lacks its own language and therefore parasites onto other adjectives, metaphors and similes twisting them for its own end and in doing so losing the precision with it the witnesses who were experts at listening and had gained incredible sensitivity to sound lacked any terminology leading to more ambiguities and confusion sound like violence itself became unspeakable and so with language at its limits the witnesses and I began to use our mouths to recreate sounds, mimicking with our lips and lungs the vibrations felt reacting with our feet the gait of the guards, tapping on the tables with pens, clapping and utilizing belts and other implements we could find in the room the sounds we began to generate and utilize in addition to the tones and foley sounds allowed us to speak together a non-verbal language where we would attempt at forging specific sounds to unexpected words to rebuild language of violence from the sound up.
So the only international observers who came to witness the appalling conditions of Saydnaya were not humans but birds house sparrows actually to be more precise and the guards as we now learned through the sound of the door would of course starve the detainees and they would torture them by leaving the food outside the door, out of the reach but within kind of smelling distance or within sensing distance this food attracted the birds from the openings in the corridor and the birds would begin to peck at the food and eat what small amounts of food were left outside the door so the detainees would try to get rid of the birds but they would be unsuccessful as they were of course not able to make a sound powerful enough to scare them off otherwise they would alert the guards and threaten their own lives in the process however when the guards would creep in the corridors the birds would fly off suddenly, the birds could also see that the guards could see the guards creeping up on the cells and forewarn the detainees by taking off in flight, fearing also for their own lives blowing the guards cover of silence this meant that the flapping of the wings could be used as kind of eyes, that the birds sight and ears as a kind of prosthesis could be used to work out the position and movement of the guards which is a kind of essential component to being there so the birds became a kind of acoustic alarm system that was so essential that whatever tiny scraps of food were left and given to them they would always spare some for the birds and leave it outside their cells the birds became a technology of counter surveillance and allowed the detainees not only to be listened to but to listen back so back to Brooklyn and sitting at the top of a lamppost which hosts all kinds of surveillance equipment including shots by the microphone is another breed of bird this one is made out of steel…”
This is Richard Finlay Fletcher and you were just reading/listening to Lawrence Abu Hamdan in a lecture that he gave in 2017 called Bird Watching. I shared a selection of the lecture, the part that was focused on the Syrian prison of Saydnaya, a prison that today (December 9th, 2024), with the fleeing of President Assad, has had its doors opened for the first time. Let me just read you a bit of news from today. This is from The Guardian, an article called: ‘Inside the Hunt for Hidden Cells in Sednaya Prison, Syria’s ‘human slaughterhouse’’: “Exclusive, The Guardian gains access to Saydnaya where prisoners are rumored to have been trapped underground as desperate relatives wait for news” and there’s a video of the journalist accessing the prison.
We’re here outside of Saydnaya prison one of the most notorious prisons for torture in Syria and as you can see there are thousands of people lining up to get into the prison tonight to see any news about their loved ones we entered and what we saw was horrible medieval scenes with cages and rooms not wide enough to fit four people but probably crammed with dozens people were digging and breaking open gates in order to see if they could find anyone still remaining in the prison there were rumors that they had found an underground level in the prison and they had just opened the doors when they came but the pressure of the thousands of people was so much that fighters shot in the air to disperse people and they had to leave
This is the reason I wanted to post Abu Hamdan’s talk today. The recording that you were listening to was from the March meeting of the Sharjah Art Foundation back in 2017 so it was in March that year but the Bird Watching talk was also delivered by Abu Hamdan in Athens for documenta 14 on the 13th of April 2017 in the Athens Conservatoire Odeion at 7.30pm. There’s no (as far as I can tell) documentation of this talk and there’s only one photograph of Abu Hamdan reciting the lecture, with an audience gathered around him, with light coming up from him and he’s surrounded by large speakers and a slideshow and on the website all you have is a very, very brief description that says: “Bird Watching is a live audio essay that examines the contemporary politics of listening and takes its departure point from the acoustic investigation of the Saydnaya prison.”
I started as in the middle when Saydnaya was mentioned and then stopped at the end before he went back to something he’d spoken about before in Sharjah, just to keep that moment of (maybe) what he focused on in Athens. If the artist wants to send me an email at minusplato@gmail.com if something different was spoken or anyone else that’s listening to this or reading this who was there to know more about the kind of conditions of the event itself which is now many years later. But I’m recording this sitting in my campus office here at this Ohio State University and on the back of my door there’s a poster produced by the graphic designers VIER5 called announcing this program called the Listening Space and the Listening Space was a program of events that attempted to explore and understand sound outside established hierarchies of music production and performance. And this is within this context that Lawrence Abu Hamdan delivered his lecture on the Saydnaya prison.
So I have this poster on the back of my door and so some of the sounds that you’re hearing from me, I’m recording this via Zoom so I can upload it as a this blog post and audio. Just thinking about this moment where this horrific place and the damage that was done to people there in Syria is now open to the world to see, I feel a deep gratitude to Lawrence Abu Hamdan for how his work brings attention to the lives and suffering of the political prisoners of Saydnaya.
