Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Air Pressure (Diary of a Sky) compiles audio recordings from Israeli fighter jets and drones flying over Lebanon throughout the year 2020-2021. The film unravels the only purpose of these fighter jets, ceaselessly flying over Beirut, who slowly succeed in transforming the landscape from the quotidian experience of everyday life into an overhead space of psychological warfare where civilians are actively intimidated by the constant sound of potential escalation. The video work weaves together a thesis about the politics of sound - an area that is often left out of image-based media - and its connections to militarist power.
This film is part of a major research project published by the artist in 2022 in which he aggregated and mapped every Israeli combat aircraft in Lebanese skies over the 15 year period since 2006, when resolution 1701 was signed as a truce. This extensive research is available at airpressure.info. The website is a searchable and interactive database which includes both documents from the UN archive and accounts of flight sightings gathered through a campaign of citizen journalism.
The practice of using sound as a military tactic dates back to World War II, where aircrafts began to fly close to the ground, creating a sonic barrier to induce fear and confusion among civilians without actually conducting an attack. The mock raids are used to create a psychological panic, the desired result being generalised fear and intimidation. The earliest records obtained by Abu Hamdan of mock raids in Lebanon by the Israeli air force are found dating back to 1949. Over the years, these sonic tactics have only increased in frequency and intensity, creating a sustained atmosphere of anxiety where the threat becomes absorbed into everyday ordinary existence.
‘Diary of a Sky’ asks the essential question of, ‘How does something so exceptional in its violence become normalized in the lives of people who experience it as a part of their everyday life?’ The work grapples with the struggles of articulating a violent phenomenon that is immense and pervasive, yet so familiar that it becomes invisible in its routine repetition. How does one describe an experience that is catastrophic, yet occupies the same space as the everyday?
The work adopts the format of the ‘diary’ as its narrative structure. This type of writing is a literary mode which allows for the monumental and the trivial to exist side by side. Lawrence Abu Hamdan uses this subjective mode of narration to decipher the sonic violence experienced during countless mock raids - documenting personal space in persistent tension and the way mind and body adapt to living under a continuous threat of violence. Through this structure, Air Pressure (Diary of a Sky) (2022) creates a space for reflection on the decades-long Israeli incursions into Lebanon. It asks how a society can hold on to its sense of normalcy when fear, trauma, and militarism become regular features of its environment.
