Forensic Architecture: Witnesses

NB: The above video is not related to the activities of the mandate of the Colombian Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition, nor is it part of the Commission’s Legacy. It is an independent, exclusive and unilateral initiative of Forensic Architecture and implies exclusive responsibility of Forensic Architecture.

Forensic Architecture: Witnesses will be the fifth exhibition in Louisiana Museum of Modern Art’s ‘The Architect’s Studio’ series. Instead of making architecture itself the object of analysis in models and images, Forensic Architecture constructs models and virtual spaces to look at specific events in new ways.

Forensic Architecture gives a voice to materials, structures and people by translating and disseminating the evidence of the crimes committed against them, telling their stories in images and sound. When an incident of violence and its witnessing are spatially analysed, they acquire visual form. Accordingly, Forensic Architecture is also an aesthetic practice studying how space is sensitised to the events that take place within it. The investigation and representation of testimony depends on how an event is perceived, documented and presented.

Unlike established forms of crime and conflict investigation, Forensic Architecture employs a number of unconventional and unique methods to shed light on events, based on the spaces where they took place. This retrospective exhibition focuses on the act of witnessing as a spatial practice. Witness testimony, which sits at the centre of human rights discourse, can be more than viva voce, oral testimony in a court. Any material, like leaves, dust and bricks, can bear witness.

Forensic Architecture investigates and gives a voice to material evidence by using open source data analysed using cutting-edge methods partly of their own design. Using 3D models they facilitate memory recollection from witnesses who have experienced traumatic events. The objective is to reconstruct the ‘space’ in which the incident in question took place and then reenact the relevant events within this constructed model. The most important sources tend to be public: social media, blogs, government websites, satellite data sources, news sites and so on. Working with images, data, and testimony and making their results available online while exhibiting select cases in galleries and museums, Forensic Architecture brings its investigations into a new kind of courtroom.

Photo credits: Poul Buchard / Brøndum & Co.