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how are you today


manusrecordingproject.com︎
“Speak­ing on a smug­gled phone from inside the Aus­tralian-run immi­gra­tion deten­tion centre on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, Abdul Aziz Muhamat related an anec­dote about his day. He’d been stand­ing near the gate when a secu­rity guard had called someone’s name three or four times. The man was stand­ing nearby but he didn’t reply. Aziz told the guard to call his ID number instead – the man responded imme­di­ately. ‘Look, man, no one is pre­tend­ing here. Why should he pre­tend?’ Aziz told the guard. ‘We forgot our names.’”
— They Cannot Take the Sky: Sto­ries from Deten­tion (2017)

Since 2013, nearly two thou­sand men have been indef­i­nitely detained on Manus Island, PNG, by the Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment – after arriv­ing in this coun­try seek­ing asylum. When the Manus Regional Pro­cess­ing Centre was for­mally closed on 31 Octo­ber 2017, after the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court declared it uncon­sti­tu­tional, the men still detained there were ordered to relo­cate to new, smaller deten­tion cen­ters in Loren­gau, the major town on Manus. The author­i­ties elim­i­nated pro­vi­sions and removed the diesel gen­er­a­tors pow­er­ing the facil­ity, but the men refused to leave: the cul­mi­na­tion of years of organ­ised resis­tance against their invol­un­tary and indef­i­nite deten­tion. Even­tu­ally, they were force­fully evicted.

The work com­mis­sioned for Eaves­drop­ping︎ is a col­lab­o­ra­tion between some of these men – Farhad Ban­desh, Behrouz Boochani, Samad Abdul, Shamin­dan Kana­p­athi, Kazem Kazemi and Abdul Aziz Muhamat on Manus – and Michael Green, André Dao and Jon Tjhia in Mel­bourne. Every day for the dura­tion of the exhi­bi­tion, one of the men on Manus will make a sound record­ing – of any­thing they like or noth­ing much at all – and send it ‘onshore’ for swift upload to the gallery. No doubt the vagaries of weather, black­outs and tech­nol­ogy, along with chang­ing per­sonal, polit­i­cal and legal con­texts, will inter­vene along the way.

how are you today opens a chan­nel for a form of speech at a moment when words seem to have been exhausted. It is at once an extremely inti­mate work – a rare oppor­tu­nity to listen to these men lis­ten­ing, only very recently, some four thou­sand kilo­me­tres away – and a highly polit­i­cal one. It intro­duces the Manus sound­scape to the gallery not just for the sake of the sounds-in-them­selves, not just as a matter of curios­ity (though the work will surely pro­duce an archive of real his­tor­i­cal value), but in a way that directly impli­cates the lis­tener and demands that we attend to the politico-legal con­texts that pro­duce and frame them.


Collaborators


ABDUL AZIZ MUHAMAT is a 25-year-old man from Darfur, Sudan. He is from the Zaghawa eth­nic­ity, and with his family, he fled his vil­lage to a refugee camp. He arrived in Aus­tralia by boat in 2013 and was taken to Manus Island, where he remains. He has become one of the pri­mary public voices among the men there, includ­ing through the multi-award win­ning pod­cast, The Mes­sen­ger.

FARHAD BANDESH is a 36-year-old Kur­dish musi­cian, painter and poet who has been detained on Manus Island for over five years. Before seek­ing asylum, he worked as a guitar maker, and has no formal art train­ing. Whilst in deten­tion, he has pro­duced solo and col­lab­o­ra­tive works of music, art and writ­ing. He loves nature and is a keen gar­dener; his sis­ters now look after his plants.

BEHROUZ BOOCHANI is a Kur­dish-Iran­ian writer, jour­nal­ist, scholar, cul­tural advo­cate and film­maker. He was writer for the Kur­dish lan­guage mag­a­zine Werya. He writes reg­u­larly for The Guardian and sev­eral other pub­li­ca­tions. Boochani is also co-direc­tor (with Arash Kamali Sar­ves­tani) of the 2017 fea­ture-length film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, and author of No Friend but the Moun­tains: Writ­ing from Manus Prison. He has been held on Manus Island since 2013.

KAZEM KAZEMI is a 36-year-old Kur­dish musi­cian, heavy metal and rock song­writer and poet. Before seek­ing asylum in Aus­tralia, he lived in Khor­ramshahr, Iran, and worked as an elec­tri­cian.

SHAMIN­DAN KANA­P­ATHI is a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee. In Sri Lanka he was a mar­ket­ing exec­u­tive and a stu­dent.

SAMAD ABDUL has been detained in an Aus­tralian run off­shore deten­tion centre on Manus for the last five years. He loves cricket and his only dream was to be a pro­fes­sional crick­eter but politi­cians have taken his dream and used him as a polit­i­cal pris­oner. Although his five years will not come back, he now wants to be a social worker to help those who are in pain.

MICHAEL GREEN is a writer, radio-maker and pro­ducer. He is the host of The Mes­sen­ger pod­cast and his work has won many national and inter­na­tional awards, includ­ing the 2017 Walk­ley Award for Radio/Audio fea­ture. He has trav­elled to Manus Island twice.

ANDRÉ DAO is a writer of fic­tion and non-fic­tion. He is the co-founder of Behind the Wire, an oral his­tory project doc­u­ment­ing people’s expe­ri­ence of immi­gra­tion deten­tion, and the deputy editor of New Philoso­pher. He is also a qual­i­fied lawyer, and has worked with asylum seek­ers and refugees in a legal capac­ity.
Notes

Archive of 84 ten-minute recordings.

Commissioned by curators Joel Stern and James Parker for Eavesdropping, an investigation between Liquid Architecture and Melbourne Law School.

https://eavesdropping.exposed/

Find out more about Eavesdropping, a Liquid Architecture and Melbourne Law School investigation, here︎.

Book

Photo of book

Eavesdropping: A Reader addresses the capture and control of our sonic world by state and corporate interests, alongside strategies of resistance. For editors James Parker (Melbourne Law School) and Joel Stern (Liquid Architecture), eavesdropping isn’t necessarily malicious. We cannot help but hear too much, more than we mean to. Eavesdropping is a condition of social life. And the question is not whether to eavesdrop, therefore, but how.

Featuring contributions from James Parker, Joel Stern, Norie Neumark, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Susan Schuppli, Sean Dockray, Joel Spring, Fayen d’Evie and Jen Bervin, Samson Young, Manus Recording Project Collective.


ISBN: 978-0-9951286-0-6
224 pages, 16.5 x 23.4 cm, paperback
Edited by James Parker and Joel Stern
Designed by Public Office, Melbourne
Distributed by Perimeter Books, Melbourne

Published by City Gallery Wellington in association with Liquid Architecture and Melbourne Law School, on the occasion of the exhibition Eavesdropping, curated by James Parker and Joel Stern, at City Gallery Wellington, 17 August–17 November 2019. The show was first presented at Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 24 July–28 October 2018. Eavesdropping is an ongoing collaboration between Liquid Architecture and Melbourne Law School.

Read a review in The Wire ︎︎︎
Buy the book or download the PDF (free) ︎︎︎


Images


Photo of the installation by Keelan O'Hehir Photo of Abdul Aziz Muhamat by Michael Green Photo of Behrooz Bouchani by Michael Green Video still of Kazem Kazemi Photo of Eavesdropping: A Reader by Jon Tjhia