Forensic Architecture: Assembled Practices

Assembled Practices exhibits investigations conducted by the London-based research agency Forensic Architecture in collaboration with communities affected by and resisting state and corporate violence, environmental destruction and human-rights violations.

Arranged as the basis for different modes of engagement, including a curriculum of student workshops and public seminars taking place in Ramallah during the exhibition, Assembled Practices outlines various counter-forensic methodologies mobilised by the agency in their efforts to socialise evidence collection. The investigations presented here speak to our methodologies, revealing the assembled techniques and diffused networks of relations that shape our political, intellectual, and artistic practice.

Our interventions bring together open source media and data, and place it in critical conversation with material we collect on the ground—involving physical traces and human testimonies.

The origins of Forensic Architecture lie in our critical practice seeking to confront settler-colonial and military violence in Palestine. Throughout the ten years of our existence, we have applied some of the experiences we had in Palestine to investigate state repression in other parts of the world. We have here chosen to display some of our interventions in these places, in the hope that they may resonate with local forms of activism and help to deepen lines of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.

Photographs courtesy of the A.M. Qattan Foundation.

As part of this exhibition, we recorded interviews with members of Forensic Architecture on our work and practice as it relates both locally to the Palestinian struggle, and internationally to cases of state violence worldwide. Interviews were conducted with FA’s Director Eyal Weizman, Deputy Director Christina Varvia, Senior Researcher Samaneh Moafi, and our dedicated Palestine-Israel Researcher, Shourideh C. Molavi, who co-curated this exhibition.