The Diary of a Sky

The COVID pandemic brought air traffic in Lebanon to a standstill. Despite this, the noise caused by planes over Beirut increased dramatically. At the peak of the lockdown Israeli fighter jets and drones overflew the city up to 50 times a day. Their altitude would suggest that they were not there for surveillance or reconnaissance purposes, but with the aim of producing noise. However, the city’s countless diesel generators, reconstruction work following the explosion and the numerous civil protests relegated these noises to a hum in the background whose threatening origins could almost be forgotten. The artist and Turner Prize-winner Lawrence Abu Hamdan calls himself a “private ear”, an independent audio investigator. In the course of the last year, he has collected over 800 recordings of Israeli aircraft which he places at the centre of his new audio-visual essay that explores the link between territoriality and atmospheric violence.