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Cloud Studies (new version, 2022) will be presented with some of Forensic Architecture’s previous investigations at Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm.
Evidence as art? It’s not an unreasonable idea considering the tradition of realism in art and the line of thinking that has tied visual evidence to truth throughout history. But examining situations and demonstrating sequences of events all the way through to the halls of justice is one of the more uncommon sights in the art world. Since 2011, Forensic Architecture has been developing methods to take over where the justice system falls short or fails the citizenry in its responsibility to assemble and analyze evidence in criminal investigations. For example, they collaborate with activists to gather data in the form of images, and they use various methods to prove where a person or an object was at a given point in time, or whether they have passed through one particular place or another. Here they rely on an architect’s tools, such as spatial visualizations and 3D renderings, to describe a sequence of events and to establish causality. They present timelines and reveal spatial relationships, and often they are able to bring into question official narratives around the nature and circumstances of a crime. Forensic Architecture work in partnership with institutions across civil society, from grassroots activists, to legal teams, to international NGOs and media organisations, to carry out investigations with and on behalf of communities and individuals affected by conflict, police brutality, border regimes and environmental violence.
In the work Cloud Studies, which is presented in a new version for the first time and constitutes the main component of the exhibition at Tensta Konsthall, Forensic Architecture takes on the airspace around us and the clouds that form in our shared atmosphere, the basis for all life and for our survival. There are existential, poetic, and aesthetic dimensions to the phenomenon of clouds. Cirrus, cumulus, stratus, and cumulonimbus. Threatening storm clouds and rosy dawn clouds. As an artistic motif, the cloud is complex because it is a body with no bounds that is constantly in motion. Traditionally it was considered an impossible motif to paint, since the artist’s brush could not move quickly enough to capture the changing form and position of clouds, and thus they were seen as something imaginary that was hard to prove exactly when, where, and what they were at any given moment. But the global political dimensions overshadow the art historical digressions in Cloud Studies. Here the center stage is given to the clouds that humanity itself manufactures—a “toxic common.” These are cloud formations that contain poison or are full of cement, construction materials, fabrics, garbage, household items, and sometimes even the remains of human bodies that have been blown up into the air.
The camera pans inexorably back and forth over the earth, reading the signs in our shared atmosphere—from the airborne chemical warfare waged on farmers in Gaza, illegal logging in the Indonesian rainforest, and the bombing of Aleppo to the profuse usage of teargas in the streets of Hong Kong, in the suppression of Black Lives Matter demonstrators, or against protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo, and culminating with the gigantic cloud that has come to symbolize the catastrophic explosion in Beirut Harbor that will impact that city’s residents for decades to come. Forensic Architecture’s many investigations of different crime scenes have been able to demonstrate structural oppression, the individual examples together describing how violence is wielded and who its victims are. Meanwhile, their working method makes clear the intensity with which contemporary culture is documented, how images are spread all over the planet, and how the ability to analyze large amounts of data is truly the tool of the future for exercising power. But it also challenges us to take action together: “We, the citizens of toxic clouds, must resist in common action.”
Tensta Konsthall is an art center in the Stockholm suburb of Tensta. Founded through a grassroots initiative in 1998, it is known to combine a high-profile program of international contemporary art with an ambition to be a palpable presence in the neighborhood.
Image credits: Jean-Baptiste Béranger (2022)