Interview by Christabel Stewart
Portrait by Runar Lindseth, courtesy of Munchmuseet

CS Tell us about your project, Zifzafa.

LAH The work primarily takes the form of a video game walkthrough, and addresses the role of sound in the formation of community, with particular focus on people living under Israeli military occupation in the Syrian Golan Heights. It revolves around research that I undertook with my organisation, Earshot, the world’s first non-profit dedicated to sound in defence of human and environmental rights. We do work for international media and human rights organisations in any instance where sound is a major issue. For instance, for stories related to audio ballistics, we determine how far shooters are from their victims and which ammunition was used. Sometimes we do original research, which is the focus of this installation. Residents of the Occupied Syrian Golan Heights asked us to help them advocate against the construction of 31 land-based wind turbines by the Israeli state – some of them just 35 metres away from their homes, and practically on top of their heads. The decibel recordings of these turbines were taken in Gaildorf, Germany. The residents of Gaildorf are five kilometres away from the turbines, but they claim they can hear the sounds on gusty days. Our video has two purposes: to simulate the effect of the noise, and also to show how it will mask the sounds there now. We worked with a local sound artist and composer, Busher Kanj Abu Saleh, who recorded all the sounds that you hear. Right now, this game is the only place you can go and turn on the turbines and simulate what it will sound like in the future. And yet, in the future, it might be the only place where you can hear what life sounded like before. 

CS Why did you choose the format of a video game?

LAH I took the constituent parts of the genre of the walkthrough – probably the most watched moving image format right now – and tried to think through it as a listening environment. When someone gets married in the Golan Heights, a car drives through the community and announces on a megaphone that the marriage is happening, and anyone within earshot can come to the wedding. That’s a clear example of the way in which sound is so fundamental; it is an acoustic bond. There’s also a local florist and shepherd you can hear, alongside musicians, wildlife, and water pumps. The other elements of the work, beyond the video, are Wind Ensemble, a documentation of a performance by saxophonist Amr Mdah from the Occupied Syrian Golan Heights, playing jazz with Levantine scales. He’s performing a kind of improvisation on top of a house that, in the future, will be 50 metres away from one of those turbines. It’s an exuberant act of sonic self-determination that’s also somehow funerary. The last piece, Tilting at Windmills, is made of three short, looping CGI animations that form a visualisation of the propagation these turbines sonically create. You’ll see it as these strange swirling patterns. The company that builds these turbines says that one takes up 1.6 kilometres of land but, in fact, its acoustic footprint will be 9 times that. So it will be roughly 16 square kilometres of land. That’s a quarter of the land left available to people in the Occupied Golan Heights today. Of the 95% taken in 1967, they have 5% left. Of that 5%, a quarter of it will now be covered in uninhabitable noise. 

CS Has this work changed your perception of climate action?  

LAH Turbines invoke a very specific kind of set of emotions, culturally speaking, especially in Europe. My daughter’s nursery was called Windmills, and it had a picture of a wind turbine on it. Generally, they tend to be seen as a benevolent image of a clean future. From a sound perspective, they’re a little more monstrous than that. I understand that they’re necessary, but what I don’t understand is why communities living with these forms of collective social organisation have to pay the price. Here, the point is to intervene in this pristine image of the turbine and show it differently. The name of the animation work, Tilting at Windmills, is taken from the famous passage where Don Quixote charges at some windmills and is floored by one of the blades, and thinks that they’re monstrous giants. Don Quixote became an important reference for me, because any act of self-determination is inherently kind of quixotic, right? The status quo has this ability to turn everything on its head – to tell us that these kids are not starving, or that someone else entirely is responsible for a famine. All of these acts of self-determination face a constant kind of gaslighting. Don Quixote became an important conceptual reference – not only because of its direct reference to windmills, but because of its inquiry into the nature of self-determination itself. 

CS What is the main thing that you want people to take from the show? 

LAH It’s really about understanding the importance of sound in the formation of community. In Ottoman law, if someone stood at the end of the village and shouted, as far as that shout reached was considered common space. No one could live there – it was used for hunting, grazing or firewood. The collective space was negotiated through sound. I think about that a lot in the construction of the game and the propagation of those noises, because it’s not just the shout that makes and claims to be the land, it’s the listener, and all the sounds that participate and ring out in that space between the shouter and the listener that create common space. Sound is inherently relational. I find that a productive and urgent mode of political critique now, in our era of capital and individuation. .

“Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Zifzafa” runs at Munch Museum, Oslo, until 4 January 2026