Lawrence Abu Hamdan - Conflicted Phonemes




Abu Hamdan, Lawrence. ‘Conflicted Phonemes’. Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Accessed 12 July 2019. http://lawrenceabuhamdan.com.
In 2012, Lawrence Abu Hamdan worked with twelve Somali people who had gone through language, dialect or accent analysis by the Dutch immigration authorities and had their asylum requests rejected

“The group created a series of nongeographic maps that seek to expose and disseminate the realities of this technology/policy. The maps explore the hybrid nature of accent, complicating its relation to one’s place of birth by also considering the social conditions and cultural exchange of those living such itinerant lives. It reads the way people speak about the volatile history and geography of Somalia over the last forty years as a product of continual migration and crisis.”

“Its complexity is a testimony to the irreducibility of the voice to a passport, namely its inapplicability to fix people in space.”

“These maps are thus meant to offer the rejected/silenced asylum seeker an alternative and nonvocal mode of contestation.”



Mark