The book is connected to Abu Hamdan’s installation Earwitness Inventory, an ongoing work consisting of sourced and custom-designed objects used to reconstruct, describe, or evoke remembered sounds.

The publication gathers ninety-six objects drawn from earwitness interviews conducted by the artist and from legal transcripts from different contexts around the world. These objects stand in for sounds that are difficult to describe with precision: a building about to collapse, a gunshot, a mechanical noise, an acoustic memory linked to violence or testimony. In this sense, the book becomes an inventory of objects that point toward a missing sonic vocabulary.

Abu Hamdan’s practice examines the politics of listening and the role of sound in law, testimony, human rights, and memory. Earwitness Inventory extends this research into book form. It asks how sound is remembered, how acoustic evidence is described, and how cinema, sound effects, and collective listening habits shape the way people give testimony. The publication can be read as an artist’s book, an archive, and a tool for thinking about the fragile relation between hearing, language, and justice.