The Diary of a Sky

There are people counting birds. Lawrence Abu Hamdan records the Israeli airspace violations, and his one-year diary of the Beirut sky tells sinister stories in an impressive crescendo. Through patience and direct (analogue) eye witnessing, he obtains detailed knowledge and makes of this knowledge a weapon – a strategy that recalls the evidential approach of the Forensic Architecture group, which works with big data and digital animation instead. Knowledge from the sky leads to open questions and suspicions, for example those concerning Israel being responsible for the pollution of the largest source of water in Lebanon. More than a specific terrorist act, an entire terrorist strategy seems to emerge when we discover Hartmut Ising’s experiments on the health impact and psychological weakening of civilians around the US-military base of Rammstein in the 50’s, and how his results cost him exile – and prosecution of the study… in Israel! The spectre of subliminal torture and bio-warfare is then surpassed in decibels by the consequences of Lebanese corruption, because the shortage of electricity in Beirut caused the increased use of electricity generators. The touristic initiative of helicopter flights over the Lebanese capital add stupidity on top of (the suspicion of) perversity and corruption. The sound pollution is a thread of a biological agenda of warfare that spare neither music nor silence: they create important pauses in the apnoeic editing of the film, but without really providing a moment of relief. The infamous Albinoni Adagio was used in Ising’s experiments, and the sudden silence of the Beirut sky is nothing less than the symptom of a definitely less subtle war on the other side of Israel, in Gaza.