Crime Scene

Reconstruction, understood as the spatial and material dimension of reen­actment, reveals its different meanings and strategies in the two cases pre­sented. For Forensic Architecture, reconstruction is a tool to establish and present what happened, very often in places that remain inaccessible to the global public.

In Kusmirowski’s case, the event is not shown in the reconstruction but only gleaned through the recreated ruin. By creating this crime scene for the viewers, the artist sets in motion a process very different from the one employed by Forensic Architecture. The viewers are not able to see the past or to establish what happened minute by minute. But they gain a chance to experience the materiality of the event, to see how the space was changed by the blast, to experience remains of the bombing without the help of a mediator explaining their meaning.

In both cases, reconstruction frames history as a violent event of destruc­tion producing the crime scene. The viewer takes the role of an investigator searching to understand the past or to rediscover its experience. I find this, together with notions of evidence and witness accounts, to be crucial for reconstruction. This is why I claim that reconstruction always leads to the crime scene—a place of the past, mystery, necros, remains, and traces. The crime scene requires a special procedure and way of gazing at it, special aesthetic strategies and particular tools.

Above all, the crime scene is full of something Jose Esteban Munoz called ephemera. In his famous 1996 text “Ephemera as Evidence,” Munoz, in order to introduce new ways of understanding history to include those vio­lently excluded from society, turns to the practices of documenting, witness­ing, and investigating. We could say that he establishes the space of history as a crime scene where the researcher looks for invisible proofs—that is, for ephemera—and not present evidence. A starting point for his consid­erations is a series of photographs by Tony Just. The artist visited men’s public toilets, places of sexual rendezvous. Before taking each photo, he thoroughly cleaned these quite dirty and run-down spaces.

Munoz writes that “the result is a photograph that indexes not only the haunted space and spectral bodies of those anonymous sex acts, and Just’s performance after them, but also his act of documentation” (Munoz, 1996, p.

To establish his methodological proposition, Munoz refers to the dialecti­cal tension between evidence and witnessing His main point of reference is Heather Dubrow’s examination of the “‘power’ of ‘proof’ as opposed to the power of a certain kind of performance which ‘silences’ demands for real evi­dence” (Dubrow, 1996, p. 17). Munoz responds to that thought by reminding us that all evidence needs explanation, a certain performance, to make them work (Munoz, 1996, p. 8). Moreover, sometimes evidence “fails to account

for the points of interaction within different minoritarian identity practices” (Munoz, 1996, p. 9). The answer is to be found in artistic practice. Munoz refers to the late Marlon Riggs’s films Tongues Untied (1989) and Black Is... Black Ain’t (1995) to show the transition from evidence to “ephemeral wit­nessing” as a way to account for black queer identity, which cannot be proven otherwise. Munoz abolishes the distinction between evidence and witnessing in order to include the immaterial, anecdotal, and ephemeral into the spec­trum of scientific interest and show that evidence—as that which legitimizes both identity and history—can be limiting and wrong.

It is crucial to understand that the formula proposed by Munoz—ephemera as evidence—also works in reverse: evidence is ephemera as long as it is not placed in the rigor mortis of archive and science. The crime scene is, in fact, a stage where things present themselves as referring to what is not there, to what is impossible to see, to what will “never be present.” Reconstructions of the bombing of Rafah and of the Czapski Palace ruins are contaminated by the ephemeral character of the evidence, which can never be stabilized or fixed, as it points to that which is not there. In the Forensic Architecture film, the ephemeral character of witnessing is mediated by the video foot­age, but the visible eyewitness quality of that footage makes it blurred and unclear. The reconstruction works to change the footage into scientifically enhanced evidence, but that in turn needs a female voice to explain it, a spe­cial operation on the viewer’s gaze to see that which is not possible to see. In Kusmirowski’s case, the reconstruction involves the viewer in a complicated game of fact and fiction, establishing itself as a highly ephemeral space of lucid dreaming and experiencing that which is not present, even nonexistent.

Reenactment theory rejects a notion of ephemerality that defines perfor­mance as something disappearing and subject to loss. Rebecca Schneider famously asked: “If we consider performance as of disappearance, of an ephemerality read as vanishment and loss, are we perhaps limiting ourselves to an understanding of performance predetermined by our cultural habitua­tion to the logic of the archive?” (Schneider, 2012, p. 139). But reconstruction opens the possibility of redefining ephemerality, of seeing it not as loss and disappearance of the body and its acts but as that which describes materiali­ty’s engagement with time, its ability to embrace the past and to contain that which is not present—that which is dead, lost, violently excluded from view.