Forensic Architecture’s first exhibition in Ramallah generated robust debate, raising crucial questions related to our artistic and political practice.

Below is the text of a statement sent to the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center on 23 August 2019. It was displayed there until our exhibition closed in November 2019.

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We are grateful that Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center provided us such a generous platform and opportunity.

This exhibition is particularly important to us given our ongoing work with Palestinian community organizers, human rights groups, and artists. We have learnt a lot from the discussions undertaken around the exhibition thus far and are looking forward to more engagement.

Exhibitions have a specific place in our practice. Our understanding of forensis (the origins of the term ‘forensics’) is as the ‘art of the forum’: a place to make things public, raise awareness and debate the meaning of work. But our evidentiary work never belongs to one forum, it seeks to move between different ones, ranging from exhibitions through the media, to courts, community spaces, and truth commissions.

A central principle of our practice is that incidents we research are located in their historical and political context, connecting them to the world that made them possible. Presenting things in this manner is one of our responses to the way we perceive the limitations of legal and human rights discourse.

The core issue around which our exhibition in the Sakakini Center is organised is that of environmental violence. The title of the exhibition, Violence: Fast and Slow, speaks to our attempt to connect analysis of incidents (eruptive, fast violence) with environmental violence (territorial, slow, colonial) — the destruction of the landscape.

The work on the incident in Umm el-Hiran for example — titled the Long Duration of the Split Second — is presented in the context of the long process of Israeli settler-colonialism in the Naqab. The same applies to our investigations of the environmental violence along the eastern perimeter of Gaza and the ongoing displacements in al-Araqib (a village that has been demolished by Israel and returned to by its inhabitants some 150 times, from 1949 to the present), both of which are instantiations of the ongoing Nakba in Palestine.

To further the discussions about this most central political and theoretical principle of our work, we invite those interested to read a chapter from a book on Forensic Architecture titled Ground Truth in both Arabic and English which most clearly describes our idea about the relation between the singularity of violence against people slow colonial violence against the terrain.