Read our report on the Shark Island concentration camp. Full investigation coming soon.

Com’è possibile far sparire le tracce della violenza dalla scena del crimine servendosi di un’immagine via satellite? Questa è la denuncia di Eyal Weizman a proposito delle nuove tecnologie digitali. Utilizzata nell’investigazione architettonica forense, la fotografia satellitare risente infatti di un grave limite di risoluzione, la cosiddetta “soglia di percepibilità“: la risoluzione massima imposta alle immagini satellitari di dominio pubblico non consentirebbe di distinguere nulla di più piccolo di un singolo pixel.

A new field of counterinvestigation in journalism, human rights, art and law

Today, artists are engaged in investigation. They probe corruption, human rights violations, environmental crimes and technological domination. At the same time, areas not usually thought of as artistic make powerful use of aesthetics. Journalists and legal professionals pore over opensource videos and satellite imagery to undertake visual investigations. This combination of diverse fields is what the authors call “investigative aesthetics”: the mobilisation of sensibilities associated with art, architecture and other such practices in order to speak truth to power.

Investigative Aesthetics draws on theories of knowledge, ecology and technology; evaluates the methods of citizen counter-forensics, micro-history and art; and examines radical practices such as those of WikiLeaks, Bellingcat, and Forensic Architecture. These new practices take place in the studio and the laboratory, the courtroom and the gallery, online and in the streets, as they strive towards the construction of a new common sense.

Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman have here provided an inspiring introduction to a new field that will change how we understand and confront power today.

ICA & Cabinet Books, 2021, 94 pages, 23.5 × 16.5 cm

This is the first installation of Forensic Architecture Reports, a series of books each dedicated to a single FA investigation, with insights into the agency’s research methodologies, additional texts from and interviews with collaborators, and dossiers of documents that shaped the investigation in question.

On the evening of 4 August 2011, Mark Duggan was shot and killed by the police in the north London neighbourhood of  Tottenham after the minicab in which he was traveling was pulled over by a team of undercover officers. The team had begun following Duggan shortly after receiving intelligence that he was in possession of a gun, and the officer who shot him testified that he had seen, for a ‘split second’, Duggan aiming the gun at him after he had exited the minicab. However, the gun was not found next to Duggan’s body on the pavement. According to the police, they discovered it in a patch of grass some seven meters away.

After a coroner’s inquest ruled Duggan’s killing ‘lawful’ and the police watchdog organisation issued a report siding with the officers’ version of events, the Duggan family’s legal team commissioned Forensic Architecture to conduct an investigation into the critical question at the heart of the case: How did the gun end up in the grass?  With no video footage of the shooting itself, Forensic Architecture had to rely primarily on the written and oral testimony of the officers involved to develop a spatial investigation designed to test the plausibility of the police’s narrative and to examine whether the officers themselves could have planted the gun.

In addition to detailing the methodologies employed and conclusions reached by Forensic Architecture, this volume offers a selection of the primary documents used for the investigation; an introduction by Eyal Weizman, director of Forensic Architecture, analysing the notions of ‘pre-emption’ and ‘split-second decision making’, which are often invoked to defend police killings of Black people; a roundtable with scholar Adam Elliott-Cooper, activists  Temi Mwale and Stafford Scott, and attorney Marcia  Willis Stewart on the complex colonial and legal histories that have shaped the policing of Black Britons in the postwar era; and the transcript of a speech by Scott on 
the struggle for justice for those who have died as a result of racialised policing.

Comment, dans un paysage politique en ruines, reconstituer la vérité des faits ? La réponse d’Eyal Weizman tient en une formule-programme: « l’architecture forensique ». Approche novatrice au carrefour de plusieurs disciplines, cette sorte d’architecture se soucie moins de construire des bâtiments que d’analyser des traces que porte le bâti afin de rétablir des vérités menacées. Impacts de balles, trous de missiles, ombres projetées sur les murs de corps annihilés par le souffle d’une explosion: l’architecture forensique consiste à faire parler ces indices.

Si elle mobilise à cette fin des techniques en partie héritées de la médecine légale et de la police scientifique, c’est en les retournant contre la violence d’État, ses dénis et ses « fake news ». Il s’agit donc d’une « contre-forensique » qui tente de se réapproprier les moyens de la preuve dans un contexte d’inégalité structurelle d’accès aux moyens de la manifestation de la vérité.

Au fil des pages, cet ouvrage illustré offre un panorama saisissant des champs d’application de cette démarche, depuis le cas des frappes de drone au Pakistan, en Afghanistan et à Gaza, jusqu’à celui de la prison secrète de Saidnaya en Syrie, en passant par le camp de Staro Sajmište, dans la région de Belgrade.

The evidential role of matter—when media records trace evidence of violence—explored through a series of cases drawn from Kosovo, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere.

In this book, Susan Schuppli introduces a new operative concept: material witness, an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events and exposing the practices and procedures that enable matter to bear witness. Organized in the format of a trial, Material Witness moves through a series of cases that provide insight into the ways in which materials become contested agents of dispute around which stake holders gather.

These cases include an extraordinary videotape documenting the massacre at Izbica, Kosovo, used as war crimes evidence against Slobodan Milošević; the telephonic transmission of an iconic photograph of a South Vietnamese girl fleeing an accidental napalm attack; radioactive contamination discovered in Canada’s coastal waters five years after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi; and the ecological media or “disaster film” produced by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Each highlights the degree to which a rearrangement of matter exposes the contingency of witnessing, raising questions about what can be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed, about who or what is able to bestow meaning onto things, and about whose stories will be heeded or dismissed.

An artist-researcher, Schuppli offers an analysis that merges her creative sensibility with a forensic imagination rich in technical detail. Her goal is to relink the material world and its affordances with the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political.

El trabajo de Forensic Architecture, una pequeña agencia de investigación con sede en Londres, ha logrado trasladar los escenarios de disputa de la disciplina y relevancia arquitectónica desde los despachos profesionales a los tribunales y foros internacionales. A través de un nuevo conjunto de sistemas de representación, análisis e investigación que cruzan investigaciones espaciales con nuevos medios de producción de imagen, toma de datos con modelados virtuales logran ser piezas clave en casos de violación de derechos humanos, conflictos internacionales al lado de comunidades afectadas por la violencia política, fiscales y organizaciones humanitarias.

Eyal Weizman, fundador del grupo, abre las puertas del laboratorio con un afán didáctico por explicar las bases principales que han sustentado su trabajo durante la última década, apoyándose en casos de estudio que nos llevan desde los ataques con drones en las montañas de Afganistán a centros de detención en Siria, del registro borroso de un disparo en un vídeo a los píxeles de una imagen satélite, de los bombardeos en Gaza a las montañas guatemaltecas. Una narración paralela que logra conectar los planteamientos teóricos de la agencia con las investigaciones que los han ido alimentando.

In recent years, a little-known research group named Forensic Architecture began using novel research methods to undertake a series of investigations into human rights abuses. Today, the group provides crucial evidence for international courts and works with a wide range of activist groups, NGOs, Amnesty International, and the UN.

Beyond shedding new light on human rights violations and state crimes across the globe, Forensic Architecture has also created a new form of investigative practice that bears its name. The group uses architecture as an optical device to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction, as well as to cross-reference a variety of evidence sources, such as new media, remote sensing, material analysis, witness testimony, and crowd-sourcing.

In Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, the group’s founder, provides, for the first time, an in-depth introduction to the history, practice, assumptions, potentials, and double binds of this practice. The book includes an extensive array of images, maps, and detailed documentation that records the intricate work the group has performed. Traversing multiple scales and durations, the case studies in this volume include the analysis of the shrapnel fragments in a room struck by drones in Pakistan, the reconstruction of a contested shooting in the West Bank, the architectural recreation of a secret Syrian detention center from the memory of its survivors, a blow-by-blow account of a day-long battle in Gaza, and an investigation of environmental violence and climate change in the Guatemalan highlands and elsewhere.

Weizman’s Forensic Architecture, stunning and shocking in its critical narrative, powerful images, and daring investigations, presents a new form of public truth, technologically, architecturally, and aesthetically produced. The practice calls for a transformative politics in which architecture as a field of knowledge and a mode of interpretation exposes and confronts ever-new forms of state violence and secrecy.

Tal vez hayan sido dos las exposiciones iberoamericanas de este año que más puentes han creado entre el arte contemporáneo y otros ámbitos del conocimiento: Cómo atrapar el universo en una telaraña (Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires), de Tomás Saraceno, que ha puesto en diálogo a la aracnología y a la astrofísica; y Forensic Architecture (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona y Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo de México), que ha llevado al ámbito museístico la investigación antropológica, urbanística y política en la violencia institucional. El catálogo es de lectura obligatoria para los interesados en cómo el Big Data se convierte en storytelling . O en cómo se pueden llevar a cabo proyectos tan potentes como esta web: “El caso Ayotzinapa: cartografía de la violencia”.

Eleven case studies spanning the period from the invention of ‘metric’ photography of crime scenes in the nineteenth century to the reconstruction of a drone attack in Pakistan in 2012, offer an ‘archaeological’ analysis of the historical and geopolitical context in which the images appeared, as well as their purpose, the way they were produced and the specific framework of their reception.

The nature and the gravity of the facts described mean that no fallacious comparison must be allowed to simplify or reduce the ambit of such images. Coming not long after the invention of the medium, everyday use of photographs in the courtroom made the image’s power as truth an essential tool of conviction in the service of justice. This power as truth has been ardently debated, sometimes legitimately contested and often contradicted.

How does the image take shape in truth-seeking scientific and historical discourse?

Texts by : Diane Dufour, Christian Delage, Thomas Keenan, Tomasz Kizny, Luce Lebart, Jennifer L. Mnookin, Anthony Petiteau, Eric Stover, Eyal Weizman

Forensics originated from the term ‘forensis’, which is Latin for pertaining to the forum. The Roman forum was a multidimensional space of negotiation and truth-finding, in which humans as well as objects participated in politics, law, and the economy.

With the advent of modernity, forensics came to refer exclusively to the courts of law and to the use of medicine, and today as a science in service to the law. The present use of forensics, along with its popular representations have become increasingly central to the modes by which states police and govern their subjects.

By returning to ‘forensis’ this book seeks to unlock forensics original potential as a political practice and reorient it. Inverting the direction of the forensic gaze it designates a field of action in which individuals and organizations detect and confront state violations.

This notebook is a philosophical and cultural-critical examination of Israel’s policy of occupation. The architect Eyal Weizman uses the term “forensic,” derived from the Latin forensis, “forum,” to reconstruct the history of attacks on and violations of buildings.

Drawing from the fields of judicial medicine and psychiatry, ‘Forensic Architecture’ revisits damaged Palestinian houses and ruins. Weizman, who is a member of the collective Decolonizing Architecture, founded in 2007, describes Forensic Architecture as ‘the archaeology of the very recent past’ and ‘a form of assembling for the future’. Forensic Aesthetics mirror relationships and logics of action, objective and subjective probabilities; what is needed is an interpreter who addresses the public in the name of a destroyed home.

In 1985, the body of Josef Mengele, one of the last Nazi war criminals still at large, was unearthed in Brazil. The ensuing process of identifying the bones in question opened up what can now be seen as a third narrative in war crime investigations—not that of the document or the witness but rather the birth of aforensic approach to understanding war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In the period coinciding with the discovery of Mengele’s skeleton, scientists began to appear in human rights cases as expert witnesses, called to interpret and speak on behalf of things—often bones and human remains. But the aesthetic, political, and ethical complications that emerge with the introduction of the thing in war crimes trials indicate that this innovation is not simply one in which the solid object provides a stable and fixed alternative to human uncertainties, ambiguities, and anxieties.

The complexities associated with testimony—that of the subject—are echoed in the presentation of the object. Human remains are the kind of things from which the trace of the subject cannot be fully removed. Their appearance and presentation in the courts of law and public opinion has in fact blurred something of the distinction between objects and subjects, evidence and testimony.