عيونك مذبحين (an audio piece) was accompanied by a paper, ”Heightened Anticipation: Sensing, Sound, and Silence in the Dark,” presented at the American Anthropological Association in Denver, December 2015. The presentation of both was sponsored by the Society for Visual Anthropology on a panel entitled: ETHNOGRAPHIC EXCESS.
عيونك مذبحين explores audio recordings made in four dilapidated cinemas in Beirut & Tripoli between 2010-2013. Two of these cinemas are now closed and two were sites of police raids. This sound piece becomes a study in sense making through the dark. Resisting transcription, the recordings contain muffled conversations, indistinct and abstract sounds, and brushes against the microphone. In that sense, they are better understood as a reflection of the ambiguities of the field site itself, and an exploration of its sensory architecture. How do these recordings function as much more than “outtakes”? How can audio recordings help to “sound out” the context of foreclosed and shuttered cinemas, and the attendant sensual overloads replete in the sounds in silence?
The sound piece will be available here July 2017