Sound in Prison: Sabina Balan & David Marin

Welcome to The Sonic Turn, a podcast about how sound reveals power, memory, and social structures. In this episode, we explore sound in prison, moving between lived, situated practice and investigative listening.

Our guests are Sabina Balan and David Marin, PhD students at UNATC, whose work is grounded in direct artistic engagement. They have developed a theatre project with inmates at the Jilava Penitentiary in Bucharest, working from within the prison space itself. Their practice listens to the everyday rhythms of incarceration — voices, silences, routines — and asks how sound can become a medium for expression, agency, and collective creation inside an institution built on control.

Alongside this practice-based perspective, we bring in the work of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, whose approach to sound in prisons operates at a different scale. As an artist and audio investigator, Abu Hamdan treats sound as evidence rather than expression. Through projects such as his investigation into Sednayah prison in Syria, he shows how listening can reconstruct spaces of violence that are otherwise inaccessible — when sight is denied, when documentation is erased, when testimony survives primarily through sound and memory. His notion of the “private ear” reframes listening as a political and forensic act.

What can sound do in places designed to silence? That question also resonates with Romania’s own recent history. In the early 2000s, the CIA operated a secret detention facility in Bucharest, known as “Bright Light,” hosted with the cooperation of Romanian authorities. The European Court of Human Rights eventually ruled that Romania was complicit in unlawful detention and ill-treatment in the case brought by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a former detainee held at the site.

From Jilava to Sednaya to Bright Light, this episode asks how listening — whether artistic or investigative — can open spaces of accountability, imagination, and resistance inside and beyond prison walls.