15 FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE

Fabrizio Gallanti

The expression “Forensic Architecture” corresponds to two complementary entities. The first is a multidisciplinary group of researchers, part of Goldsmiths College, University of London, using architectural expertise and various means of visual representation to provide and analyze evidence gathered from a wide array of cases of institutional violence, breaches of human rights, and environmental crimes.

The second could be considered as a novel disciplinary field at the edges between architec­ture, environmental studies, law, forensics, history, and legal medicine, initially established by the practical applications of architectural expertise, and now proving the efficacy and success of a concept that can be translated to numerous other subjects. In fact, in various parts of the world, there is currently a multiplicity of disciplines that exercise different forms of“forensic architec­ture” applicable to diverse cases analogous to the ones investigated by the London-based group.

The group was created in 2010 within the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, around a research project dedicated to investigate the killing of Palestinian protester Bassem Abu Rahma, hit by a tear gas grenade fired by soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces during a demonstration at the separation fence in Bil'in on April 17, 2009. The investiga­tion was requested by the human rights lawyer and activist Michael Sfard to present evidential findings to the Supreme Court of Israel. The research that then led to the coalescence of a more formalized unit within the university was initiated under the direction of Eyal Weizman, who was then the director of the Centre for Research Architecture and who currently acts as the director of Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths. In 2011, the European Research Council granted funding for four years to support the activities of the unit, followed in 2013 by a sec­ond grant dedicated to the implementation of a multimedia data-aggregation and visualization platform called Pattrn.

It is relevant to underline how the notion of “forensic architecture” has been circulating since the early 1980s, generally in connection with the freshly minted profession of “forensic architect,” a category of building surveyor specializing in presenting evidence to courts han­dling insurance disputes over defects in buildings (Paegelow, 2001). Under Weizman's guidance, Forensic Architecture has widened the semantic range of the concept beyond the sector of building insurance, where expertise is customarily used to determine contested responsibili­ties between designers and contractors. The term is now mobilized to extract from buildings and spaces objective information that can be presented as complementary evidence in disputes concerning state violence and the breach of human rights. Still consistent with Paegelow's definition, where forensic architects deal with “the application of architectural facts to legal problems,” Weizman and his colleagues—architects, artists, filmmakers, journalists, scientists, and lawyers—are developing the profound transformation of what “legal problems” mean. These are no longer qualms about leaking ceilings or collapsed structures but a whole body of facts, frequently charged with deep political significance. The key notion that allows the performance of forensics from architecture is that

architecture and the built environment thus could be said to function as media, not because photographs of buildings might circulate in the public domain, but because they are both storage and inscription devices that perform variations on the three basic operations that define media: they sense or prehend their environment; they hold this information in their formal mutations; and they can later diffuse and externalize effects latent in their form.

(Weizman, 2017a)

A very schematic characterization of a research project developed by Forensic Architecture since 2010 may be given as follows: a non-governmental agency or a subject, such as the family of a victim, contacts the unit to ask for support with a case which may be undergoing litigation in a national or international court, or coming to the attention of public opinion.

While the process of assembly of information is under way, different experts proceed to gen­erate reconstructions, using visual tools derived from architecture, engineering, urban planning, and cinema. These reconstructions, composed from the fragmentary elements that are avail­able, can be seen as “architecture in reverse,” a crucial concept that underlines the ideological approach of the group. By comparing photographic pictures taken from different angles, by sub­jecting leaked official imagery to deep reading by dedicated software, or by carefully analyzing raw sound footage, sometimes just downloaded from YouTube, it is possible to discern how a room collapsed or to trace the trajectory of a bullet. Forensic Architecture then generates three­dimensional digital models and a complex set of analytical drawings that constitute an accurate depiction of a specific space or building, caught in the precise historical moment of an event.

In the transition from the initial meaning of “forensic architecture” to the new concept explored at Goldsmiths, a significant change occurs. Within conventional insurance procedures, the object of the study is the building itself, and the goal is to identify the causes of its malfunc­tion (is the collapse of a slab determined by a flaw in the design, the inaccurate calculation by consulting engineers, or by the poor execution of construction by the contractor?). However, in

the new Goldsmiths model, the building becomes instead a set or medium traversed by actions and bodies whose traces and effects may be identified, interpreted, and understood.

The first relevant public appearance of the group's work occurred on November 12, 2012, when a report about the use of white phosphorus artillery shells by the Israeli army dur­ing the 2008—2009 Gaza conflict was presented at the Annual Meeting of State Parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) in the United Nations Office at Geneva. The report was produced at the request of the human rights group Yesh-Gvul with the intention of forcing the Israeli military to suspend the use of such weapons. By studying the morphology of the smoke plumes caused by the explosions, registered by various images availa­ble in the public domain and by the use of photogrammetry, then comparing the relative heights of existing buildings with the position and profile of the smoke, Forensic Architecture developed a parametric three-dimensional model comparable with known formations of exploding white phosphorus artillery shells used by US forces during the siege on Fallujah in Iraq in 2004. The report concluded that the type of anomalous explosions registered in Gaza was consistent with the use of such munitions not to create smoke screens as initially claimed by the Israeli army, which had denied their use, but rather as a deliberate assault on the civilian population. Not in the position to confute this conclusion of the report or the veracity of the evidence on which it was founded, the Israeli attorney general opposed its admissibility, minimizing the relevance of the architectural expertise employed in the case.

“Forensic architecture” as conceived by its exponents is an emergent field. As in other moments in history, it is moving at an accelerated speed, constantly experimenting to estab­lish its protocols of operation, its objects of action and research, and its moral obligations and rules. This exhilarating moment is akin to the beginning of radiology within medicine at the end of the 19th century or the progressive affirmation of international human rights law since the second half of the 20th century. To accumulate a critical mass of information and to then read it analytically in order to constitute a new area of knowledge, the members of Forensic Architecture and a growing number of allies and stakeholders are following three complemen­tary lines: testing tools and methodologies, creating a theoretical framework, and understanding the different contexts in which the products of the investigation will circulate.

Since 2010, the intensive production of investigations, solicited by third parties or initiated by the group itself, can be seen, on one hand, as an immediate response to the pressing needs and conditions specific to each case; and, on the other, as an expanding depository of ideas, methods, and technological advances that will be available for later use. The totality of the work performed and being performed to date is experimental by nature: it does not derive from pre­conceived methodologies and techniques, as if the know-how was already present, but rather it revolves around temporary alliances of different experts formed according to the circumstances peculiar to each case. While each challenge experimentally discovers a hidden truth, it also gen­erates feedback loops identifying what methods work well and what not so well, what could be implemented again or discarded.

The investigations vary in scale: they can extend to the entire area of the Mediterranean between Libya and Sicily in order to establish the accountability of European governments in the death of migrants crossing the sea on makeshift boats (Forensic Oceanography, 2011 with Situ Research); or they can be narrowed to the interior of a room such as the one in Miranshah, North Waziristan, where four people were killed by a drone strike on March 30, 2012. They consider very different objects of inquiry, such as the vegetation captured in satellite images in rural areas of Guatemala between 1979 and 1986, the transformation of which provided clues to the deliberate devastation of the resources of local communities by the army and paramilitary forces. They collate thousands of pictures and footage found on social media to reconstitute the bombing of Rafah, in Gaza, between August 1 and August 4, 2014. They employ different techniques of representation to generate a compelling and clear visual narrative that can then be presented in public. This often occurs through films, where digital animations and reconstruction may be crucial to support the argument, as in the investigation of the shooting of Nadeem Nawara and Mohammad Mahmoud Odeh Abu Daher in a Nakba Day protest outside of Beitunia on May 15, 2014.

A common thread across all these different endeavors is the one of the “reenactment.” In order to convert the mass of information into an intelligible account, it becomes necessary to devise a mechanism whereby a specific space is calibrated to an event that occurred there. Such an objective, derived from criminal investigations, where the crime scene is revisited to recreate the sequence of events, sometimes including potential suspects and witnesses, was clearly illus­trated in the investigation conducted into the murder of Halit Yozgaton on April 6, 2006, in his family-run Internet cafe in Kassel, Germany. For this investigation, Forensic Architecture recre­ated a 1:1 scale model of the original police reenactment scene. This demonstrated that the police failed to assess the veracity of an eyewitness statement made by a member of the Hesse Office for Constitutional Protection (Landesamt fur Verfassungsschutz). In this example, the reenactment of another reenactment took a physical form, and it can be said that every single investigation by Forensic Architecture is just such a reenactment of an official reenactment of the circumstances of the case. What changes are detectable, the motives and methods of their creation, and what asym­metries appear in the media of their presentation in regard to the storage and release of data? One reenacts the truth as a lie; the other recovers the truth by reenacting the reenactment, seeing how the lie was constructed. This is reenactment in reverse performed by architecture in reverse.

The second line of thinking guiding the efforts of Forensic Architecture involves the estab­lishment of a philosophical framework for this field. Such an objective is achieved through texts, essays, and public appearances where, by means of a braid of narrative lines, different investiga­tions are used to corroborate more abstract reflections. Especially in Weizman’s texts and lec­tures, it is possible to discern a very sophisticated balance between philosophical and historical references on the one hand, and mundane yet telling examples on the other. His writing style is fluid and allows for a continuous oscillation between philosophical reflections derived from his readings of scientific or legal literature, and historical facts. In its literary strategy, it recalls Michel Foucault’s attempts to determine novel areas of inquiry for philosophy, whether the history of repression in 19th-century Europe or the history of sexuality, both based on an open and vora­ciously curious use of disparate sources.

The theoretical apparatus of Forensic Architecture is therefore composed of a series of con­cepts that can also become operative angles with which to analyze reality. These include first, the concept of a “threshold of detectability,” namely the position that felonious or violent acts are concealed before and frequently after the fact if interested parties find it convenient to do so. Second, the concept of a “material witness,” applied to an object treated as a witness within a legal procedure owing to the marks that it made or sustained at the scene. Third, the concept of “negative evidence,” used when the absence of a certain type of evidence is itself telling as evidence (the dog that did not bark). Fourth, the concept of “before-and-after images,” when the comparative reading of pictures produced at different moments of the same event allows an indisputable inference to be drawn. These are some of the key ideas that are slowly establishing the practical and theoretical basis of the enquiries of Forensic Architecture. So, following some of the protocols of the scientific method, each investigation can also be seen as an experiment that will verify or falsify the theoretical hypothesis with which it began (corroboration).

The third line of reflection deals with the modes of disseminating the knowledge accrued from investigations. Forensic Architecture identifies two principal sites for its action: fields and forums. The field is the place where the investigation is conducted; for example, the state prison in Syria, the rural outskirts in Mexico, or the village in Afghanistan. The forum, from where the word forensics derives, is the public sphere, often a court, where the results of such investigations are presented, debated, and contested. None of them is a neutral entity, with each enmeshed within a specific context. Concentrating on the notion of “forum,” it is important to appreciate how the impact of Forensic Architecture is registered outside the limitations of conventional legal procedures. In fact, the admissibility of their findings has varied. Their principal “victories” have been won in the public sphere, outside the judicial arena of the court, as in the case of the white phosphorus used in Gaza. This was demonstrated again when the German authori­ties released confidential documents in 2017 confirming the hypothesis advanced in the Kassel investigation. The mobilization of public opinion has proved the strongest instrument of moral and political pressure developed so far.

It is not incongruous, then, that Forensic Architecture has often presented its work within the framework of art exhibitions. Such were “Forensis,” curated by Amselm Franke and Eyal Weizman and presented in Berlin and Buenos Aires in 2014; “Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics,” presented at MACBA in Barcelona in 2017; and “Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture” at the ICA in London in 2018, which led to a nomi­nation for the 2018 Turner Prize. These exhibitions of the plastic dimension of the work of Forensic Architecture at biennales, galleries, and museums, accompanied by screenings, lectures, workshops, and, of course, forums, expand both the versatility of the group and its appeal to the public, offering to worldwide audiences hybrids of artistic and evidentiary techniques, all of which may be adapted and modified by other stakeholders. These exhibitions also explore how to refine the myriad ways audiences may be engaged by the visual impact of forensic mate­rial, either through infographics or even sculpture: for instance, when replicas of the plumes of smoke of the Gaza bombings were rendered as solid shapes. The format of the exhibition also permits a rapidity and openness that contrast with the ritual slowness of legal procedures and the confidentiality insisted upon by security agencies: they have a swifter and clearer route to the counter-narrative that is the key instrument of the group. Indeed, Weizman's writings frequently underline the intention to “wrestle” with evidentiary material, to destabilize the monopoly on the term “forensic” enjoyed for so long by official professions and agencies, and to move toward a democratic and shared collective use of such a term. More ambitiously, it is to instigate the reversal of partial and disingenuous reenactments by bringing to the surface of a second reenact­ment the facts the first concealed.

Further reading

Heller, C., and Pezzani L., 2018; Weizman, E., 2017b.