Voices outside frontiers
Lawrence Abu Hamdan exhibition “Voices before the law”, creates a powerful political statement on speech, accent, immigration, and human rights.
I like to think of the human body as something which cannot be completely controlled. The restrictive, controlled-based Western society (as Michel Foucault calls biopolitics) towards the body exists, but, on the other way, human bodies has always an element, a small piece, which cannot be controlled or domesticated.
In this body, I include the power of voice, our basic human expression. Power tries to dominate it, and that is oppressive, it hurts, but there will always be resistance despite the hurt.
This was the impression that I had in the exhibition "Voices before the law", from Lebanese artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan (in Hamburger Banhof Museum, in Berlin, until February/2020). The three installations seem to talk about the power of its voice.
An immense, all-white room is opened to the visitor with a discrete installation in the opposite corner, made by small rectangular pieces still unidentified by far. In our left, the title and explanation of the exhibition, with the bold title "Voices before the law". In the meantime, I could hear another of Lawrence s installation in the next corridor, the one that the museum elected as the focus of the exhibition. Hear what? Well, voices, of course.
I walked right to the rectangles mentioned, which are actually the work "Disputed Utterance" (2019). Two doubles of human upper mouth pictures where put together side by side — maybe five or six groups of two. Getting closer, one can see that these images are formed by four layers, giving profundity to the mouth pictures. It is anyhow demonstrated that Lawrence is talking about mouth and speech. Scientific images of the biology field but also of Linguistics. The other rectangles, positioned below the average reading high of human eyes (the mouth pictures are above that) are short stories about misunderstandings on accent and pronunciation. I photographed two of them:
Phonology is a field of study that concerns the speech sounds of the fundamental components of a language. It shows that the mouth, teeth, and tongue design is both 1) shaped by the native language of the speaker and 2) defines how well the speaker’s pronunciation on other languages — as I have difficulty to speak English words with th, for example or the Spanish pronunciation of no in the sad story depicted above.
There is not really such thing as craved separation between culture or nature, at least in language. We talk as we have been formed, but we also can only talk the way our body (our mouth) permits us to do.
The corridor that leads to the next room make another installation (the main one, which has the voices), and the fact that it is in a passage is symbolic. Eight monitors, four each side, show images of people talking, yelling, and celebrating. They appear and disappear in an unsynchronised way varying with the black frame of the monitors. And the sound: as you pass the corridor, their voices echoed. One may try to get along with eyes and ears the echoing images and the echoing voices, with little success.
Could echoes be political? In this case, in the Israel-Syria frontier, yes they are. "This whole time there were no landmines" (2017) shows mobile phone recordings taken in 2011 in the area of the Syrian Golan Heights, a region occupied by Israel since 1967 and unilaterally annexed by it in 1981. That separated cities and families and generated extreme political and social instability in the region (last week, the UN officially asked Israel to leave Golan Heights. Trump already showed his support to Israel do keep it).
Due to the particular acoustics, an area of the hilly region became known as “shouting hill” or “shouting valley”. The region’s topography can amplify voices and permit communication with megaphones across the border. The work, which uses images from 2011, shows the moment protesters from all over the country gathered on the Syrian side of the border. Unexpectedly, a group broke into Israeli territory, for the first time since the border was established.
The echoes go beyond the bodies can actually go — in this case, they can even surpass a military and violent border. The fact that Hamdan places the viewer in the middle of the voices and images, for me, seems to remember us that.
Accent and immigration are scrutinised in the last room, with more conceptual work. This installation talks about the discrimination of refugees and asylum seekers in European countries based on… voice. In this specific case, of Somali people. The work denounces one technique used by border control authorities in Europe who proclaims which asylum-seekers have the "real" accent from the region they are urging to escape.
A huge blue frame on the wall that is the graphic the team constructed with the complexes changes in the Somali language during the last four years of political instability and war (Somali region is a former colony of both England and Italy). The instability that deeply impacted lives and, also, language and accent.
On the other wall, frames of "accent tests" are placed side by side, with corresponding copies on paper placed in front of them (visitors could pick samples).
One side of the paper shows the results, and the other side explains the big project that united a group of linguists, artists, researches, activists, and refugees in 2012, altogether with a group of Somali asylum-seekers rejected by the Dutch authorities. It also explains that a lot of these strange tests are made by a Swedish private company, by phone interviews.
According to the paper,
The meeting was called because we feel that these accent tests are becoming increasingly unjust and prevalent in denying legitimate claims of asylum. The tests are relatively unheard of outside os specialists working in the field and creating these images is a way of disseminating its existence. We hope that when we know of such a policy, we might reflect on what our own hybrid accents say about our place of birth; how we change and adapt our voices in different social situations and how complex our accents would be after a lifetime of migration.
Language if fluid, accent is too. Our accent can change depending on where we come from and where we live today. It can change depending on who we live with. Our jobs, our everyday lives, and influences. As accent is a primary source of belongingness by institutions, social groups can be automatically excluded. To deny asylum based on a standardised voice check is to simplify and reject people’s lives, problems, and suffering. It omits the history of these people and rearranges them in palatable pigeonholes. The law, in this case, tries to control the voices based on what it wants them to be.
"Voices before the law" shows that voices cannot be fully controlled, but also that the power tries to do it. Voices can be repressed, expelled or some of them even killed, but they can also resist. Even if the law does not recognise it, or suppress it, voices will continue to speak, to echo, apart from it, as the own human body which can never be fully categorised or institutionalised.
