I oversaw the acoustic portion of the 2016 investigation into Sednaya, the most infamous prison run by the Assad administration, in collaboration with Forensic Architecture and Amnesty International. Journalists and independent observers had been unable to enter the prison from the 2011 start of the uprising against the regime until the early hours of Sunday. The only sources of information on and documentation of the mass murder, torture, and violations that occurred there were the recollections of the few individuals who have been freed.
The ability of detainees to see anything was severely limited in Sednaya. Detainees were blindfolded from the moment they were removed from their houses or removed from demonstrations and placed in prisons. They were kept in dark cells, forced to hide their eyes, and forced to face the wall when the guards were around. They eventually become extremely sensitive to sound. As an audio investigator and artist, it was my responsibility to create “earwitness” interviews with six Sednaya survivors, utilizing their auditory recollections to help uncover the crimes that occurred there.
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.
All we had to tell the tale of this death camp back in 2016 were murmurs, echoes, and sesame seeds. We have already seen documentation of what those survivors told me in the days since it was freed; in one video, a man does not respond to his liberators when they ask his name and instead maintains the submissive squat position that prisoners were made to adopt in front of the guards. The liberation of Sednaya will allow for the application of more practical investigation techniques, such forensic anthropology, to comprehend the scope of this crime against humanity.
We learned from our inquiry that the violence that took place within the prison was inextricably linked to its construction. Survivors believed that the building experience was inextricably linked to torture, hunger, the continual fear of death, and sensory deprivation. Even Nevertheless, our social media feeds are already displaying very different pictures of Sednaya. While the incessant noises of torture are replaced by the disbelieving shouts of captives at the moment of their release, we observe individuals walking through it freely, with lights on, talking loudly, and their eyes open.
Many of the survivors we spoke with opposed the demolition of Sednaya, despite the horrific nature of their ordeal. In their ideal Syria, this weapon disguised as a building would be kept intact, and the memories it holds would be protected.
Another witness, Samer, recalled the happy sound of bread hitting on the floor outside the cell doors, a sign that he would have enough food for another day. He stated that he would record this sound, set it as his ringtone, and play it at his wedding if he could hear it again. I learned how valuable the memory of oppression and brutality can be from this reaction to a sound that captured so much of the anguish he experienced.
It is now necessary to use Sednaya to help the hundreds of lives it has impacted. Making it a place to preserve the memories of the thousands of people who survived this death camp and for those who did not presents a chance to use it for healing.
In Sednaya, witnessing was a survival tactic. You could live if you could always hear the guards and know where they were. It was crucial to pay attention to the acoustic details, such as the resonant metallic “tong” of the guards descending the metal central spiral staircase, the specific lock that would indicate which cell door they opened, the number of new inmates being brought into the prison, and the names of those being taken for execution that were overheard.
They were able to live thanks to all of these nuances, which also helped us preserve Sednaya’s history for future generations. I learned how to listen and use sound to defend human rights from these survivors/earwitnesses. I learned from their keen sensitivity to sound how this medium can be used as a tool for collective punishment and torture, but I also learned how powerful listening can be as a form of resistance.