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‘The instability of an accent, its borrowed and hybridised phonetic form, is testimony not to someone’s origins but only to an unstable and migratory lifestyle, which is of course common in those fleeing from conflict and seeking asylum Is it not more likely then, than a genuine asylum seeker’s accent would be an irregular and itinerant concoction of voices, a sort biography of a journey, rather than an immediately distinguishable voice, that owes its unshakable roots to a single place?’ –Lawrence Abu-Hamdan ‘The Freedom of Speech Itself’ (2012)     Some artworks reveal something you didn’t know before They cast light on hitherto unknown facts that move you profoundly upon learning This is a particularly successful art experience, one you part with an anxious, perhaps even nervous, sense of awareness And what I learned, on a very cold London morning last January at The Showroom, after listening to Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s ‘The Freedom of Speech Itself’ is that for the past two decades a methodology called forensic speech analysis has been used by several border agencies throughout the West as a means to determine the national identities and geopolitical origins of suspicious prospective immigrants or political refugees On a practical level that means that asylum seekers might be denied access to safer ground on the basis of their accents or pronunciation of certain vowels, according to the field’s expert phonetic atlas   The piece, considered by its author to be a documentary, offers abundant facts A North-American sociolinguist for example, clearly worried about the extent to which this method has been adopted, tells us how forensic speech analysis was developed in the early and mid 1990’s in the Scandinavian countries, particularly Sweden, by linguistic experts working within their asylum and immigration bureaus A few years later, he continues, these experts span off and created independent companies, selling their expertise back to their governments and eventually to other countries These days the border agencies of UK or Australia, for example, might record a ten to fifteen minute interview with their suspicious asylum seekers and send the tape to the companies