FORENSIS:
The Architecture of Public Truth

Edited by Forensic Architecture
Sternberg Press, 2014

Book launch
at The Show Room, London

Monday 19 May 2014
6.30–8.30pm
No booking required

Presentations start at 7pm, followed by an open discussion.

Researchers from the Forensic Architecture project will host a guided tour through the recently published volume FORENSIS: The Architecture of Public Truth. Speakers include Eyal Weizman, Susan Schuppli, Shela Sheikh, Francesco Sebregondi, Godofredo Periera, Helene Kazan, and Lorenzo Pezzani.

Forensis is Latin for ‘pertaining to the forum’ and the root of the term forensics. In excavating the origins of the term, the volume seeks both to expand the scope of contemporary forensics, and to challenge its popular role in articulating notions of public truth.

At the heart of the book is a methodological experiment in which the architects, artists, filmmakers, lawyers, and theorists who worked together on the Forensic Architecture project at Goldsmiths, University of London, employed new technologies and spatial research methods to investigate critical contemporary issues such as border regimes, urban warfare, and climate change.

These investigations—undertaken in Pakistan, the Amazon basin, Yemen, Chile, Bangladesh, the United States, Palestine, Guatemala, the former Yugoslavia, and the Mediterranean Sea, amongst other places—generated evidence of state or corporate violence on behalf of prosecution teams, civil society organizations, activist networks, human rights groups, and the United Nations.

By presenting investigative reports on this work together with critical essays situating contemporary forensics within its broader historical, theoretical, political, and aesthetic contexts, this collection suggests ways in which new engagements with the materiality of the world can expand our political imagination, open up alternative forums for civic dispute and practice, and articulate new claims for justice.