In 2016, I worked with Forensic Architecture and Amnesty International to lead the acoustic part of the investigation into Sednaya, the Assad regime’s most notorious prison. Since the uprising against the regime began in 2011 until the early hours of Sunday, the prison had been inaccessible to journalists and independent observers. The memories of the few people who have been released were the only resources available to learn about and then document the mass-murder, torture and violation that took place there.
In Sednaya, prisoners’ capacity to see anything was highly restricted. From the time detainees were taken from their homes or pulled out of protests and thrown into cells, they were blindfolded. In the cells they were kept in darkness, made to cover their eyes and face the wall in the presence of the guards. Over time, they developed an acute sensitivity to sound. My task, as an artist and audio investigator, was to develop “earwitness” interviews with six survivors of Sednaya, using their sonic memories to help reveal the crimes that took place inside.
As well as darkness, silence was brutally enforced. To speak, cough or audibly move was to risk death. Even when the prisoners were being beaten they could not make a sound and thousands of those who could not stop themselves from crying out were killed. With the survivors I interviewed, I set about using tones, white noise and re-enacted whispers to measure the silence and the lethal pressure it exerted.
One description of that silence has stayed with me ever since. Jamal, a witness I interviewed told me: “One of the loudest sounds, aside from the horrendous torture noise, was the killing of lice”, the amplitude of which, he said, was equivalent to “crushing a sesame seed between your thumb and forefinger.” If you have a sesame seed in your kitchen, I implore you to take it now, crush it and imagine just what kind of violent force it would take to maintain that level of quiet in a building containing thousands of people.
The only thing to puncture the silence was the beatings that would vibrate the walls and reverberate throughout the empty water pipes in the cells. “It doesn’t sound as if someone is hitting a body”, Jamal explained, “but like someone is demolishing a wall.” “The whole structure vibrates,” Salam told me, as he described the way the regime weaponised the omnidirectional bleed of sound so that a beating for one was experienced by all. And then silence.
Back in 2016, whispers, echoes and sesame seeds were all we had to tell the story of this death camp. In the few days since it has been liberated, we have already seen documentation of what those survivors described to me; in one video a man remains in the submissive squat position prisoners were forced to occupy in the presence of the guards and he does not reply to his liberators when they ask his name. Now that Sednaya is liberated, the work of more tangible investigative practices, such as forensic anthropology, will commence in order to understand the scale of this crime against humanity.
Our investigation taught us that the architecture of the prison was inextricable from the violence that happened inside. In the minds of survivors, the experience of the building could not be isolated from hunger, torture, the constant threat of death and sensory deprivation. And yet already completely different images of Sednaya are landing on our social media feeds. We see people moving through it unhindered, with lights on, talking loudly, with open eyes, while the endless sounds of torture are replaced by the incredulous cries of prisoners at the moment of their liberation.
As horrendous as their experience was, many of the survivors we interviewed didn’t want Sednaya to be torn down. They foresaw a free Syria, in which this weapon in the guise of a building should be preserved and the memories it contains safeguarded.
Samer, another witness, remembered the joyous sound of bread slapping on the floor outside the cell doors, a noise that meant that he would have just enough food to live another day. He wanted to hear this sound again and said that if he could, he would record it, make it his ringtone and play it at his wedding. This response to a sound that encapsulated so much of the horror he lived through taught me just how precious the memory of violence and oppression can be.
Sednaya must now be used to serve the thousands of lives which were imprinted by it. There is an opportunity to use it to heal by making it a site of the preservation of memory of the thousands of people who survived this death camp and for those who did not.
To witness in Sednaya was an act of survival. Hearing and identifying where the guards were at all times could help you live. Listening out for the sonic details was vital, be it the resonant metallic “tong” of the guards descending the metal central spiral staircase, or decoding which cell door they opened by the particular sound of that specific lock, or by hearing how many new prisoners were being brought into the prison and committing to memory any names overheard of people being taken for execution.
All these details helped them to survive, but also helped us to tell the story of Sednaya for future generations. In this way, these survivors-cum-earwitnesses taught me how to listen and use sound in defence of human rights. Their acute sensitivity to sound taught me how this medium can be a weapon of torture and collective punishment – but also how effective listening can be as an act of resistance.