Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics

Both ‘forensics’ and ‘architecture’ refer to well-established disciplinary frames. Brought together, they shift each other’s meaning, giving rise to a different mode of practice. While architecture adds an essential method of investigation, forensics demands that architects pay close attention to the materiality of the built environment and its media representation.

Traversing the entire exhibition across three galleries, a hundred-metre-long back wall has been conceived of as an extended essay that echoes the investigations included in the galleries, presenting theoretical and methodological reflections on contemporary investigative aesthetics. The investigations are arranged according to scale, beginning with the human body and moving through rooms, buildings and cities to territories and oceans, from micro-analysis to the scale of the planet, the ultimate forensic object, which human-induced climate change has transformed into both a construction site and a ruin.

While exploring the development and transformation of the investigative practice that bears its name, the exhibition challenges us to consider how contemporary artistic practices and media technologies can be geared to engage this reality of post-truth.

Above: Installation view of Towards an Investigative Aesthetics / Hacia una estética investigativa at MACBA (Miquel Coll)