Forensic Architecture
The bomb hits the building in the film Rafah: Black Friday by the Londonbased group Forensic Architecture. The agency was founded in 2010 as a part of a research project run by Eyal Weizman.
After the project finished, the group continued to be financed by different sources to conduct investigations in the public interest against those in power and political systems trying to hide or deny a crime.2 This particular film is one result of their investigation of an Israeli bomb attack on Gaza on 1 August 2014. One can read in the report prepared by Forensic Architecture with Amnesty International that on 8 July 2014, Israel launched Operation Protective Edge, a major offensive in Gaza. On 1 August, when the 72-hour ceasefire between Hamas and Israel was proclaimed in Rafah (the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip), a group of Israeli soldiers encountered Hamas fighters and the fight began again:A fire fight ensued, resulting in the death of two Israeli soldiers and one Palestinian fighter. The Hamas fighters captured an Israeli officer, Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, and took him into a tunnel. What followed became one of the deadliest episodes of the war; an intensive use of firepower by Israel, which lasted four days and killed scores of civilians (reports range from at least 135 to over 200), injured many more and destroyed or damaged hundreds of homes and other civilian structures, mostly on 1 August.
(Amnesty International, 2015)
As the investigation team was denied access to Gaza and the actual crime scene, they used footage from news media, social media, and satellite sources to build a detailed narrative and thus reconstruct one chain of events of that day. The film starts with footage of the bombing from three different sources: a bomb falls on a building and produces a smoke plume. By identifying its shape, the investigators are able to establish the temporal relationship between the sources.
(Figure 3.1) They then learn the positions of the three cameras, and by using frames with visible shadows, they manage to establish the precise timeline. Then all the footage is mixed and moved to a 3D model of the neighborhood, enabling the bombing to be replayed. Witness accounts that fit the reconstruction are played. The film ends with the names and, where available, photographs of the 16 victims of this attack.
Figure 3.1 Forensic Architecture located photographs and videos within a 3D model to tell the story of one of the heaviest days of bombardment in the 2014 Israel-Gaza war. The Image-Complex, Rafah: Black Friday (Forensic Architecture, 2015).
In the book Forensis, which provides a theoretical background for Forensic Architecture’s practice, Weizman writes in an essay entitled “Matter against Memory” about investigations that could not take place at the site, which were therefore undertaken without access to the crime scene or other material traces:
Without the possibility of traveling to the sites of the strikes, and with the images available to us degraded to a considerably lower resolution than those in the archives of the state agencies pursuing this campaign, we turned to witness testimonies. This was not simply a return to the aural dimension of victim testimonies, as conceptualized during the “era of the witness”: rather, the mode of engagement with testimonies that follows the “forensic turn” involves their enhancement and entanglement with different techniques and technologies of interpretation, most of them spatial.
(Weizman, 2014b, p. 373)
The same strategy in working with data is used in the Rafah film: the footage of the bomb and smoke plume was made by eyewitnesses so as to document what happened. All the footage is also technically enhanced and then used to determine the details needed to form a spatial model of the attack (Figure 3.2).
The efficacy of this strategy lies in the close relationship between memory and space, which Weizman explains by recalling the classical category of the “art of memory.” Referring to Cicero and Simonides,
Figure 3.2 Video still showing two bombs in mid-air fractions of a second before impact in the Al Tannur neighborhood in Rafah, Gaza on 1 August 2014 (Forensic Architecture, 2015).
the author reports that the memory technique consists of placing thoughts and parts of an argument in different rooms of an imagined building that will constitute a mind map for delivering a speech to the public. It suffices for the speaker to simply close their eyes. Finding themself in the building, they can recreate the steps leading from one thought to another and in this way, recall everything they meant to say. Weizman writes: “The mnemonic techniques of the art of memory, attributed to this experience, have since reserved a special place for architecture as a medium for establishing relations between people, places and things” (2014b, p. 374). In the investigative context, this means that if a crime scene is not accessible to investigators, it is possible, through the precise reconstruction of its architecture, to trigger the memory of witnesses whose recollections are connected to the spatial organization of the event. Hence, it is this spatial model that comes to encapsulate the event, in contrast to dispersed documents and accounts. This is exactly the logic behind the Rafah investigation. The video footage cannot itself assume the role of evidence against the Israeli government and trigger the reaction of the public, because it does not contain enough information. It is only possible to establish what the footage actually shows, and to recreate the chain of events minute by minute, by putting together all the amateur video recordings (having the status of testimonies) and forming a 3D model of the city.3
The fluidity of the difference between a witness account and the material evidence is crucial to understanding the theoretical standpoint of Forensic Architecture.
In Mengeles Skull (2012), Weizman, together with Thomas Keenan, formulated the concept of the “forensic turn,” which occurred in frameworks of memory studies after the era of witness in the 1970s. By telling the story of the birth of forensics as a practice of interpreting things, changing them into evidence by means of complicated technological and scientific procedures, the authors state that if the Eichmann trial triggered “advent of witness,” then the Mengele case could be seen as the parallel “emergence of the thing,”(Weizman and Keenan, 2012, p. 13) introducing a new concept of proof based not on the unsure, ambiguous, and emotional witness account but on the claim of scientific objectivity. Nonetheless, as the authors show, all the evidence needs to be presented during the trial by an expert, and this presentation echoes the complexities of the testimony.4 If the status of witness accounts is connected to the “silence, distortion, confusion, or outright error [in which] trauma—and hence the catastrophic character of certain events—was inscribed” (Weizman and Keenan, 2012, p. 12), then the status of the evidence is strictly associated with the aesthetic operations that frame its presentation to the court and public.Recalling the Latin word forensis, which means “bringing to the forum,” the authors write about a strategy of prosopopoeia—“the figure in which a speaker artificially endows inanimate objects with a voice” (Weizman and Keenan, 2012, p. 28). According to this strategy, forensics involves a relation between three components: an object, a mediator, and a forum. The political power of forensics lies in the possibility of reconfiguring or creating new forums by aesthetic means of image or language, translating the object into proof of a crime; the power of witnessing, meanwhile, is connected to building a morally challenged public around a reenactment of the trauma. But the use of electronic media further complicates this constellation.
Weizman writes that contemporary modes of prosopopoeia require the transformation of objects and landscapes into data sets. As a result, the objects are referred to as if they were human subjects, and the difference between the material status of the proof and the ephemeral status of the witness account disappears. What’s more, the “translator,” the actual “person” providing the meaning of the presented data, is no longer necessarily human, and forums are no longer places or buildings—they are dispersed over the network in different media forms (Weizman, 2014a, p. 10).The object, mediator, and forum go through interesting shifts in forensic thinking. In Rafah: Black Friday, the bombing happens in the city, it destroys buildings, it modifies architecture which, in the form of ruins, becomes a material imprint of the event—its obvious traces. But investigators cannot access the crime scene, can neither touch nor examine those traces. What they have in their hands is the video footage of the attack depicting its impact on the urban space. As Weizman states in the context of another case, however, the difference lies only in the medium. For Forensic Architecture, the ruins and footage have exactly the same function: they serve as recording devices. “Both the roof and the negative were simultaneously examined as images and as material things, the former made of concrete and the latter of silver salts. One materiality was reflected in another” (Weizman, 2014b, p. 365). The object is understood not as a thing but as a record, an imprint of the event in any medium, possible to imagine also as a hole, a lack, a significant absence of something. The materiality is defined by physicality but also by the ability to hold a trace, registering the event. From that perspective, the story told by a witness can be an object as well. Moreover, in Rafah, a female voice explains all the procedures applied to the footage. Step by step, not only is the history of the attack revealed but also that of the investigation.
So the mediator translating the object is, in fact, telling a story of their own process, which is also mediated by the usage of special computer algorithms and technologies allowing them to produce the film. This film presenting the investigation becomes an object and a mediator at the same time, both a material record of the procedure and a proof presenting itself to the forum. The simple triangle of object, mediator, and forum becomes, rather, a branched network of multidirectional relations producing evidence, with their aesthetic effect mobilizing the forum to react.In the case of Rafah: Black Friday, the reconstruction of the attack, serving as proof that it did happen and showing in a detailed way how it took place, is possible because it takes into account the impact of the attack on the architecture and space of the city. The destruction changed the material setting in an irreversible and unrepeatable way. But, as Weizman explains for Forensic Architecture, buildings and cities are not just “passive elements” registering the events, “nor are they just the scenes of a crime, the locations in which violence takes place.” They rather compose whole environments together with services, spaces, and technologies “with the capacity to act and interact with their surroundings and shape events around them.” This means not only that human actions are framed by architecture and material setting but also that the whole environment actively and “sometimes violently” shape events (Weizman, 2014a, p. 16). To reconstruct the event, then, requires reconstructing this whole network of buildings, infrastructure, services, environments, even landscapes, and views (like the view of the smoke plume) in a new medium, making it possible to show these assemblies of structures acting together. That is why it was necessary to recreate the city space as a 3D model in Rafah. The actual space is translated into a set of data and image, making it possible to replay the scene of the bombing from multiple angles and points of view, showing different aspects of the event. The past crime is brought into the present by reconstructing its space and its material setting, constructing an architectural stage for the recorded images to overlap and form sequences and scenes.
The history imprinted in Rafah’s bombed ruins is revealed, brought to light, shown in full view. It is shaped in the form of a spatial model replaying the events to combat the denial of the Israeli government. The reconstruction—as a process of establishing what happened on the basis of fragments of stories, images, and documents, and as a product of this process taking the medial and material form of the film—is, in this case, concentrated on making the world see what would otherwise stay hidden from it. This particular goal marks the reconstruction of the attack with a certain unequivocal character leaving no space for speculation, for other facts or interpretations that disturb or do not fit the constructed shape of the past. The reconstruction, the rebuilding of the architectural environment of the crime putting in motion precise repetitions of the events, presents itself as a politically engaged practice of revealing the violence and fighting the “politics of negation” by reasserting the visibility of the crime. To reconstruct is to show to the forum what happened in an aesthetically constructed form in order to mobilize the public to act.
These processes of rebuilding and replaying visual evidence are central to Forensic Architecture’s approach, but reconstruction does not always show the events. As the next example illustrates, reconstruction can also serve to hide the events in question, instead allowing the past to act in the present through unexplained traces and remains.