(gentle music)
(dynamic music)
(train screeching)
- I'm not really an artist.
I never studied at art school.
I call myself a private ear.
And I've dedicated a lot of work
to thinking about a politics of listening.
That's quite different to politics of speech,
where everyone should have a voice.
Because where and when those voices are heard
is just as important.
(dynamic music continues)
Not truly understanding how that voice is heard,
you miss literally half the story.
Part of the work has been to try to sort of define
where those limits are, those limits of listening.
(dynamic music continues)
When I began an acoustic investigation
into a prison that was modeled on this GDR archetype.
The Mercedes-Benz of prisons in Syria,
the one I investigated, is called Saydnaya.
These films and performances are a proposal
to listen to people in ways in which I think is adequate
for the kind of political claim that I'm making.
This listening tower has a...
In a documentary, or in the news,
there's really strict conventions
about the way we think we should listen to people.
In the space of the museum,
you have this chance to experiment
with the ways in which you can actually present a story.
(banging)
Walled Unwalled is a set of reflections
from having conducted an investigation
into the Syrian regime prison for Amnesty International
working with Forensic Architecture.
(crowd shouting)
- [Narrator] Since 2011, tens of thousands of people
have disappeared into a vast network of prisons
run by the Syrian government.
Many have been taken to Saydnaya.
Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture
traveled to Turkey to meet a group of Saydnaya survivors.
We used architectural and acoustic modeling
to reconstruct the prison
and their experiences of detention.
Because the prisoners were held in darkness,
their memories depend on an acute experience of sound.
- I was tasked to lead the sound component
of that investigation, and to try and solicit
as much information as we could
about what was happening inside there.
And yet, all of the witnesses insisted to me
that the walls of their cells
shook from the beatings that took place
in distant and unlocatable areas of the prison.
Later I understood why.
The shape of the building,
the dimensions of the corridors,
meant that sounds made in the cells
are reflected towards a central tower.
For them to kind of claw back knowledge
in the face of sensory deprivation
was a real powerful experience.
(person shouting)
The wall is something that was completely containing them.
Yet, the leaking of the sound through the wall,
that was their way out to the world.
The wall was kind of porous.
- Room one series closeup, take one. (claps)
- The whole idea with Walled Unwalled
was to have this performance play out
in an old recording studio.
Everything you see is shot through that soundproof glass.
It all felt like a way of speaking about the prison.
And in some point in the film
you see someone flashing a light.
She was flashing the light because there was no
audible communication through these walls.
I mean, they were really soundproof.
Now, no wall on earth is impermeable.
Today, we're all wall, and no wall at all.
Ironically, the more we are connected,
the more walls are shown to be this sort of futile thing,
the more we're invested in protecting the border.
(somber music)
Borders are not lines.
They are these layered spaces, rich with history.
- There is a US border guard sitting in that car there.
The engine stays running
and his eyes remain laser focused on the main door.
(mysterious music)
Each visitor who crosses the street over from the US
must also exit back into the US.
Those who come from the right, from Canada,
must not, under any circumstances,
even if they have a valid visa,
exit the library into the US.
The border cannot be crossed here.
And yet, inside it's like the border doesn't even exist.
Technically, Agatha Christie sits on a shelf on US soil,
while Iggy Pop's biography is in Canada.
- [Film Worker] A1-Eagle, take one. (claps)
- This library and opera house were built on the border
between Canada and America.
And that seemed to me as a space in which
you could tell the story of borders,
starting with that electrical tape
that cuts through the library.
Expand on that and show all of the way
in which the border exists as something that is absurd.
And yet, they are this sort of network of power
that is being exerted, sometimes in completely lethal ways.
- When the murder took place,
the murderer and the murdered were actually
in entirely different jurisdictions.
Though Mesa's firearm was stretched out
into Mexican territory, his feet were three inches
behind the American border.
If Agent Mesa had stepped over the line,
there would be no question of Mexico
demanding his extradition for murdering their citizen.
(haunting music)
At the Supreme Court, a hypothetical emerged.
If Mesa could be prosecuted,
could anyone killed abroad by a US agent
seek justice in an American court?
No.
- It was such a close decision, five-four.
What swayed it was to recognize
that should they convict Agent Mesa,
they would be opening up themselves to litigation
of every drone strike, because it's the same story, right?
Someone pulls the trigger in Arizona
and somebody dies in Yemen.
(haunting music)
Well, I was born in Jordan.
But I also grew up in Yorkshire.
And I was exposed to the DIY music scene in Leeds.
(dynamic music)
I spent years abusing my hearing,
playing in bands and making a lot of noise.
It showed me how organization around sound
and music was a political act to bring together communities.
Works that I make are cross-disciplinary.
And they demand the help and resources of people
who are really in their discipline.
It's always a a team effort.
(moaning, clanking and tapping)
The beginning was great. - Yeah.
- The sort of the keys.
- Can you hear that, I don't? - Yeah.
I think starting with those details,
working with the knocker,
and then moving between the sort of the lollipop on that,
and then to this. - Do you like this?
Do you like opening this, or should I stay away from it?
- No, no, do that.
That was really good. - I'm kind of like...
(moaning)
- I specifically didn't want a sound effects artist
to play those doors because I knew that they would
know what they're doing with them.
That they would sort of fall into a disciplinary mode
in which they're able to do things with those doors
that is part of their professional world.
(tapping)
I wanted to see what else those doors would be able to do.
Making whale calls, then slamming them
and bringing them back to their door-like form.
And that was really important to the story
I was trying to tell about acoustic memory.
(mallets banging and tapping)
Sound effects are really key in the way we can both
solicit memory, but the way we also
commit those sounds to our memories.
The doors in Saydnaya Prison
had a similar effect on its survivors.
See, none of the door sounds I played
satisfied Samara's acoustic memory.
We found one that was okay,
but he kept telling me to raise the volume.
The sounds were getting louder and louder,
until finally I played him the sound
of a huge metal door slamming
with the reverb set to Notre Dame Cathedral.
Upon hearing this, Samara was taken aback.
He stopped me and he said, this sound was present.
This was the exact sound, not of the door,
but the sound of sheets of bread
being dropped to the ground outside my cell.
(pounding)
We would use a lot of sound effects
for those ear witness interviews to really get to
the sound that we were talking about.
And sort of also place them in space.
And so I built this inventory of sound effects.
(banging tapping and popping)
Based on all the legal cases I'd worked on,
what would I've used in a case where I need
to recreate a ricochet off a border fence in Palestine?
(banging and crashing)
They really were very important in the case of Saydnaya.
The metal door, a wooden door,
and a car door, adapted for my means.
And the idea that you could really construct
a whole array of door sounds from just this one instrument.
Goalkeeper gloves. The granite stone tiles.
Green coconut, shouting. Ice cream truck.
Where is the gun? Music box.
(airplane whooshing)
Over the last 15, 16 years, Israeli jets
and drones flying over Lebanon have created
a kind of acoustic fearscape for people living in Lebanon.
Air Pressure began as a acoustic investigation.
(keyboard tapping)
It's a website that sought to produce
some understanding about what was happening
in the air over Lebanon.
I'm trying to, you know, Shazam the skies.
Hear a unmanned aerial vehicle, identify that.
Hear a fighter jet, identify that.
And then start to hear the difference
between an F16, an F35.
We produced the first database
of these military aircraft in the sky.
And the numbers were staggering.
22,111 of them over the last 15 years.
(somber music)
And you see them interlinking and overlapping over time.
It's not a map of a territory,
but it's actually a kind of cartography of pressure
that's being exerted down.
It happens to be the shape of Lebanon
simply because the aircrafts have covered
the entirety of the country.
This is not a work about whose air it is being violated.
The air doesn't belong to the Lebanese either.
It's a work about how you turn the air violent,
and how sound is really an effective way to do that.
(airplane whooshing)
You can see every tweet and video made
referring to these aircraft in the sky.
You see people joking.
Some people say, "Oh, look at these planes.
They're going so low they're gonna cut my laundry wires."
Other people, you can tell they're scared.
They say, "Look what they have in their arsenal.
May God protect us."
Other people simply use this hashtag
حربي بالاجواء
which means war in the atmosphere.
The website circulated very heavily
because no one had ever done that work before.
And in fact, the Lebanese government who contacted me later
had basically told me that they had never even done this.
(airplane whooshing)
When I was producing Air Pressure,
and it got all this international attention,
it occurred to me that 10 years had passed
of doing this kind of acoustic investigation,
and that it needed its own kind of space.
Well I decided to start this agency called Earshot.
(dynamic music)
We're a small team of people.
There's been a greater awareness of why sound matters
for open source investigations.
I'd learned enough doing these projects
that I could also start to train other people
to do this work, and we could start to build our own agency
for acoustic and audio analysis.
I wanna build greater cognizance for what
good listening can do, and what story sound can tell.
There's so much more to do,
and so many other ways in which we can give people
the space and time to be heard.
(dynamic music) (people chattering)