The Diary of a Sky unfolds an atmospheric symphony of violence over Beirut, revealing the haunting fusion of incessant Israeli military flights and the hum of generators during blackouts. This 45-minute video essay  plunges viewers into a chilling chronicle of daily life transformed by the weaponisation of the air, where the terror of repeated incursions becomes a disconcertingly banal backdrop.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an independent investigator or Private Ear. His investigations focus on sound and linguistics and have been used as evidence at the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and as advocacy for organisations such as Amnesty International and Defence for Children International together with fellow researchers from Forensic Architecture.

“We feel the air as a material; it’s materialised through the noise of aircraft. I wanted to close the conceptual gap between noise pollution and air pollution because I think something is lost when we separate these conditions out. What this work is trying to do is really take sound seriously as an activation of air. When we smell old diesel smoke emerging from some water supply truck, we are suddenly made aware of what’s going into our lungs, whereas we may not have been before. This is what’s happening with these F-35s and our ears. Through the sounding of the air, the vibration of its particles, the air becomes a volatile compound — of noise, dread, carbon dioxide, monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, and all the other toxic emissions of international militarism.” (Lawrence Abu Hamdan)

English subtitles