Forensic Oceanography is a project initiated within the Forensic Architecture agency by Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani, in the wake of the Arab uprisings of 2011. It seeks to critically investigate the militarised border regime imposed by European states across the EU’s maritime frontier, analysing the political, spatial, and aesthetic conditions that have transfomred the waters of the Mediterranean into a deadly space for the illegalised migrants who attempt to cross it. More than forty thousand migrants have died on the Mediterranean over the last thirty years, victims of what Forensic Oceanography calls ‘liquid violence’.

By combining human testimonies with traces left across the digital sensorium of the sea—constituted by radars, satellite imagery and vessel tracking systems—Forensic Oceanography has mobilised surveillance technologies ‘against the grain’, to contest the violence of borders and the regimes of (in)visibility on which that violence is founded. The seas have been carved up into complex jurisdictions, permitting states to extend their sovereign claims through policing operations beyond the limits of their territory, while recusing themselves from obligations such as rescuing vessels in distress. Forensic Oceanography locates particular incidents at sea within the legal architecture of the EU’s maritime frontier, so as to determine responsibility for them; the agency’s reports have served as the basis for several legal cases against European states, and their videos have been exhibited internationally.

For inquiries please contact forensicoceanography@gold.ac.uk.