Ground Truth: The al-Araqib Museum of Struggle

Forensic Architecture will inaugurate Ground Truth: The al-Araqib Museum of Struggle. This transitory museum is a collaboration with the unrecognized Bedouin village of al-Araqib and dedicated to the ongoing struggle for their ancestral land in the Naqab Desert, Israel. A collaborative mapping involves aerial photography from kites (with Public Lab) and historical research (with the NGO Zochrot). With the local families we have produced a body of evidence that assembles historical reading of the silver salt grains of the 1945 RAF aerial images of the area, through the pixel grids of contemporary satellites to the floating point-cloud particles of our low flying kite surveys.

Founded in 2010 Forensic Architecture (FA) is a group that has developed a new practice for undertaking investigations into political controversies and human rights abuses. This practice uses architecture as an optical device to generate evidence, and cross references it with a variety of sources, such as new media, remote sensing, material analysis, witness testimony, and crowd-sourcing. Bringing together architectural, artistic and media research, FA constitutes a radical formulation of media art in the 21st century. Its work seeks to reverse the direction of the forensic gaze and to turn it back on those very state agencies — the police, military, or secret services — that otherwise use forensics (surveillance, tracking, and pattern analysis) to govern or control populations.