Lawrence Abu Hamdan performing Contra-diction: Speech against itself. Photo courtesy of the artist (via)Sound and society collide in the work of Beirut artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan. At this intersection, he creates audiovisual installations surrounding what he calls the "politics of listening." His work looks at how the voice—its quality and expressive tones—is an important tool politically, legally, and religiously, and how it is used, abused, and muted.
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Along with placing his work in museums like MoMA and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Abu Hamdan has also submitted it as evidence at a 2013 UK asylum tribunal, where he testified as an expert witness. Along with his installations, performances, and audio pieces, he also DJs under the name DJ Business Class, and carries out forensic audio investigations for research and for legal investigations.Abu Hamdan will be presenting a new iteration of the final part, called Contra-diction: Speech against itself, of his Aural Contract trilogythis week at the Festival of Voice in Cardiff, Wales, UK. The trilogy looks at the function of the voicein law and how it's changing with new technologies, increased border control, and all-pervasive government and corporate surveillance systems.The third part, an audio essay that is part lecture, part exploratory sound art, part performance piece looks at the politics of the voice and silence in relation to the idea and practice of taqiya. Taqiya is a Shia Islamic concept where a Muslim is able to lie or not tell the complete truth to protect themselves from coming to harm or being needlessly prosecuted. Abu Hamdan believes the concept could also be used to protect the politics of our voices in an age of technological intrusion, scrutiny, and oversharing.In a Q+A interview, Abu Hamdan told The Creators Project more about his trilogy, taqiyya, and the voice and its relationship to politics:
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Contra Diction: Speech Against itself 2014, performance at Cornerhouse Manchester. Image courtesy of the artistThe Creators Project: Can you give a brief explanation of what constituted parts one and two of the Aural Contract trilogy and the concept behind the project?Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Part one was titled The Freedom of Speech Itself and it looks at the history and contemporary application of forensic speech analysis and voice-prints, focusing on the UK’s controversial use of voice analysis to determine the origins and authenticity of asylum seekers’ accents. Here, testimonies from lawyers, phonetic experts, asylum seekers and Home Office officials reveal the geopolitics of accents and the practices of listening that led to shocking stories of wrongful deportations.Part two was called The Whole Truth and was about technological rather than human listeners. It specifically focused on the current application of voice analysis as a lie detection method recently piloted by European, Russian, and Israeli governments, as well as being employed in border agencies and insurance companies all over the world. This technology uses the voice as a kind of stethoscope, an instrument to measure internal bodily responses to stress and tension—a material channel that allows the law’s listening to bypass speech and delve deeper into the body of its subjects. To the listeners, it offers a fresh look into how truth is constituted, to whom truth matters and who can use it; it complicates the current conventions of testimony and its relationship to trauma, free speech, technology and the body. When combined with the experimental audio composition, appropriated radiophonic techniques and the sculptural installations around them, these audio documentaries are designed to question the fundamental ways in which we speak and listen.
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Contra-diction: Speech against itself has also been a 2 channel video installation.Can you describe the format of the “live audio essay” for the finale? How are different sounds, manipulations, and samples incorporated, and how do they inform the overall piece?The term "live audio essay" is a term I use to describe what perhaps others are calling “performance lectures.” I think there is a laziness around this term “performance lecture” or perhaps I never understood it as to me all good lectures are also good performances. Live audio essay is a clumsy but precise way to describe what I am doing on stage, it's an audio essay because it's not only the words I speak that carry the thesis but also the way the sounds and the voice itself is manipulated and put to work as a material for the listeners to engage with. Because these works are about speech and speech is the medium of the lecture, there is a collapse between content and form which creates a really interesting site of "live" experimentation. In this particular work the audio is often contradicting what I am saying or undermining the form of this monologue with all the other voices and split personlities that make up this work.Why did you want to explore the concept of taqiya for the finale?Part one and part two of the trilogy are showing that in the face of this new regime of listening we still seem to cling to the increasingly outmoded rights and laws that govern our speech in society. For example, the human right to the freedom of speech may still be protecting what we say and the expression of our opinions, but not the expression of the voice itself. If the freedom of speech is to stand up to this new political context that our voice faces it needs to be expanded to include and protect the sonic quality of our voices as well. Another of these laws, the right to silence, offers a mode of withdrawal from public speech, from the necessity to confess, yet it is the very withholding of our voices that can mute our political agency. The withholding of our voices also alleges guilt by virtue of its very withholding, as we see from those in government who espouse the defense of the NSA and LVA 6.50, as they consistently proclaim that the only people who fear these systems or who don't want to participate are those who have something to hide, those who are guilty of something. So I went looking for another way, to add another legal right to these more tried, tested, and exhausted laws that govern our voices and patrol our ears. Looking for a precedent and a more robust means for our voices to retain their politics in the era of the algorithmic regime of truth production and accent analyses, I found an old and esoteric piece of Shia Islamic jurisprudence called taqiya.
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Your background is in DIY music, how has that informed what you do now with sound in these performances?Yes, for me “DIY music” is a term that refers not to a genre but to a specific political approach to cultural production that tries to operate outside the commercial confines of the music industry—believed by many to be set up in a manner that favors neither artists nor audiences. Here I was working with a network of bands who release their own records, book their own tours and attempt to organize musical environments that were accessible to all and strictly not for profit. This was my introduction into working with the interrelations between sound, voice, and politics a set of relations I have continued to investigate as a visual artist.How would you describe the term the “politics of listening”? Is it about the state listening to us, or the way we listen to each other and different forms of media?There is a forthcoming artist book in which I try to capture and define the politics of listening. The book is titled [inaudible] A Politics of Listening in 4 Acts and comprises a series of transcripts of what was once live speech; sermons, monologues, testimonies and interviews made during the course of the last six years of my research into the long ear of the law. [inaudible] is the way transcribers and stenographers categorise human speech or any other sound that can not be heard or could not be made intelligible. A voice that is not possible to write, a sound that cannot be transcribed, speech that does not make the historical record except in its very inaudibility. The threshold of audibility is the threshold of the political. It is those [inaudible] voices and sounds that are not yet intelligible to the political ear is the site of struggle in the politics of listening. So politics of listening moves away from classic notions of advocacy and of giving people a voice. It is not a call for free speech or to have an equal platform for all voices to be heard—it is an intervention into and a reorganization of the forms that listening to that speech takes. A politics of listening does not simply seek to amplify voices but attempt to redefine what constitutes speech itself.
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Spotting the Shottspotter: photograph of Shotspotter microphone installed on the top of a street lamp. Images courtesy of the artist (via)In a post-Snowden world how have the political implications of our voices, how we’re heard, and how we listen, shifted?In times past when we swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in a court of law, we would undergo a transformation; once those words were uttered in that space we would inaugurate new conditions of listening and our speech would transmute from normal conversation to liable testimony. Yet now we are in an age where we become sworn-in the minute we accept the terms and conditions of a particular communications software or email provider. These vast apparatuses of listening, constantly filtering our communication for incriminating key words, mean that all the speech we utter is liable wherever we are. We can no longer depend on a place and time to which the law acts on our voices, there is no longer simply the police interrogation room and the witness stand, our speech is now legally accountable in all sites and across international jurisdictions.With technology making our lives increasingly less private, both in terms of what we willingly post online and how we’re tracked, do you think we need to re-evaluate the importance of silence?This question is exactly why I am exploring the emancipatrory potentials of taqiyya. In its simplest possible articulation, taqiya is a legal dispensation whereby a believing individual can deny his faith or commit otherwise illegal acts while they are at risk of persecution or in a condition of statelessness. Taqiya is a withdrawal from the fundamental obligation to perform oneself in public, to speak on behalf of ones self, to confess ones heart of hearts. In this way taqiaya is not unlike the Right to Silence—it is a legal dispensation to not speak the whole truth if the truth may cause you harm. Yet silence and secrecy infers guilt in today’s all speaking, all hearing world and taqiya’s strength is that it can exist as silence disguised as speech. Taqiya does not produce the loud present/absence of silence rather it is silence camouflaged by words. In taqiya there is no binary division between what one says and what one does not say. There is not one but many silences that fill the spectrum of speech. In this wa,y taqiya is a contra- dictionary concoction of simultaneously speaking freely and remaining silent. Taqiya is not speaking truth to power, but rather it is lying back.
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