Charles Heller

Charles Heller is SNF Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Bern where he is leading the ‘Circumference of Violence research’ project (2024-28) and Director of Research of the Border Forensics investigation agency. Prior to founding the Border Forensics agency, Heller co-directed the ‘Forensic Oceanography’ project with Lorenzo Pezzani between 2011 and 2021, within the broader Forensic Architecture agency. As a researcher, filmmaker and human rights activist his work has a long-standing focus on the politics of migration, borders, mediation and the law within and at the borders of Europe.

Charles Heller has been involved in the Forensic Architecture project since it’s early days. Heller conducted his PhD thesis at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London. Its core was constituted by the ‘Forensic Oceanography’ project, which developed new cutting-edge methods to document and understand the policies and practices that lead to widespread deaths and violations of migrants’ rights at the EU’s maritime frontier, and support through this research different nongovernmental actors aiming to contest this lethal border regime.

As part of the Forensic Oceanography project Heller co-authored a number of human rights reports, including ‘Report on the Left-to-Die Boat’ (2012); ‘Death by Rescue’ (2016) ; ‘Blaming the Rescuers’ (2017); ‘Mare Clausum’ (2018) and ‘The Nivin’ (2019), which have contributed to strategic litigation and have had a major impact within the fields of migration and border studies, nongovernmental politics and the public sphere. The videos and other visualisations based on these investigations have been shown in a broad range of academic and activist contexts, and exhibited internationally, including at the HKW in Berlin, the Venice Biennale, the MACBA in Barcelona, the MOMA in New York, the ICA in London and Manifesta 12 in Palermo.

In the aim of scaling up and consolidating the approach developed within the Forensic Oceanography project and adapt its methods to other contexts and modalities of border violence, in 2021 Heller co-founded the Border Forensics research and investigation agency, based in Geneva, for which he acts as Director of Research. Border Forensics develops new methods to investigate the continuum of violence experienced by migrants as they attempt to cross Europe’s disseminated borders, from the increased danger they face as they cross the desert of Niger as a result of outsourced border control to the violent intersection of state borders and racial boundaries they encounter within European cities.

Heller’s current research project, the ‘Circumference of Violence research’ focuses on the transformation and normalisation of violence across the external borders of the EU, exploring the following overarching question: How do the practices of different actors at the border, as well as political and legal processes across different scales – local, national and European – shape changing modalities of border violence? To answer this question, the project focuses on four case studies located across the circumference of the EU external borders – from Spain to Poland – which it analyses comparatively and relationally through anthropological and geographic approaches and critical forensic investigative methods.