Shibboleth
Conflicted Phonemes, 2012, Lawrence Abu Hamdan with graphic designer Janna Ullrich.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an independent investigator or Private Ear with a great interest in the political use of sound and linguistics.
Conflicted Phonemes is made of vinyl wall prints and takeaway printed A4 sheets on a shelf. The prints visualize the complex relation between a person’s place of birth and linguistic identity, whilst also examining how itinerant and precarious social conditions and cultural exchange result in a hybridization of accents, thus questioning the efficacy of forensic technologies and practices of “bordering” conducted by Dutch immigration authorities.
I wish I could experience this work and the follow-up, also from 2012, The Freedom of Speech focusing on the UK’s controversial use of voice analysis to determine the origins and authenticity of asylum seekers’ accents. The Freedom of Speech is a mixed-media installation comprising a stereo audio documentary and an acoustic foam sculpture on the geopolitics of accents and listening practices that have led to shocking stories of wrongful deportations.
Judges 12:5-6 English Standard Version: they said to him, “Then say Shibboleth,” and he said, “Sibboleth,” for he could not pronounce it right. Then they seized him and slaughtered him at the fords of the Jordan. At that time 42,000 of the Ephraimites fell.
There are lots of articles on Abu Hamdan’s work. Here just one written by Emily Apter : Shibboleth: Policing by Ear and Forensic Listening in Projects by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 2016 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_a_00253
Abstract: Drawing on the work of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, a British-Lebanese artist and researcher currently based in Beirut, this essay examines the juridical and conceptual field of critical forensis which is situated at the juncture of security studies, art, and architecture. Abu Hamdan extends forensics to the area of “new audibilities,” with a focus on the politics of juridical hearing in situations of legal-identity profiling and voice authentication (the “shibboleth test”). Abu Hamdan's projects investigate how accent monitoring and audio surveillance, voice recognition, translation technologies, sovereign acts of listening, and court determinations of linguistic norms emerge as so many technical constraints on “freedom of speech,” itself a malleable term ascribed to discrepant claims and principles, yet taking on performative force in site-specific situations.