Forensic Architecture is an on-going research project, funded since 2011 by the European Research Council[1]. It is hosted by Goldsmiths, University of London within the Department of Visual Cultures. Based at the Centre for Research Architecture, the multidisciplinary project-team includes architects, artists, geographers, scientists, information designers, jurists and media scholars.[2]
Project overview
editThe project seeks to explore how violations of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law are registered by the spaces though which they takes place; and how violent events can be reconstructed out of the traces they left behind in built environments, landscapes and the monitored surfaces of the earth.
The combination of two factors - the rising urbanisation of conflicts, and the dissemination of remote-sensing technology - is leading spatial representations to play a growing role in the construction of narratives of violence, and their consequent arbitration. Geospatial data, satellite imagery, physical or digital models, but also photographs and video recordings by hand-held devices, are increasingly employed to generate evidences of localised violence (for example, of destroyed buildings, mass graves or attacks on civilians). Those are then presented, and disputed, in international legal and public forums.
"Forensic Architecture" is organised around the investigation of several legal controversies situated in different regions of the world. In each case, it seeks to unpack and exhibit the architecture of the alleged violations, which can be understood as the spatial relations between a sequence of causal links. The project is driven by the introduction of the new operative concept of forensic architecture: an analytical method for probing events as registered by the material scenes of their unfolding, or as inscribed in their dispersed imagery. By helping to extend the means by which violence could be mapped and modelled, Forensic Architecture seeks to create new grounds for thinking Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law as they bear upon spatial structures and relations.
Team
editThe project team includes:
- Eyal Weizman (Principal Investigator)
- Susan Schuppli (Senior Research Fellow and Project Coordinator)
- Thomas Keenan
- Anselm Franke
- Brad Samuels (Situ Studio)
- Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss
- John Palmesino
- Alessandro Petti
- Charles Heller & Lorenzo Pezzani
- Paulo Tavares
- Lawrence Abu Hamdan
- Francesco Sebregondi (Project Administrator)
Publications
editWeizman, Eyal / Keenan, Thomas (eds.) "Forensics" issue of Cabinet 43, Fall 2011. Including texts by Eyal Weizman & Thomas Keenan; Alain Pottage; Lawrence Abu Hamdan; Susan Schuppli; Godofredo Pereira; Greg Siegel; Paulo Tavares.
Tozzi, Lucia (ed.) "Architettura Forense / Forensic Architecture" special file in Abitare 506; 508-510. Including texts by Eyal Weizman; Lorenzo Pezzani; Paulo Tavares; Füsun Türetken.
Di Carlo, Tina. "Dying to Speak: Forensic Spatiality." (Interview with Eyal Weizman) Log 20, Fall (2010)
Weizman, Eyal. "Forensic Architecture: Only the Criminal Can Solve the Crime." Radical Philosophy 164, Nov/Dec (2010): 9-24.
Weizman, Eyal / Tavares, Paulo / Schuppli, Susan / Situ Studio. "Forensic Architecture." In Post-Traumatic Urbanism: Architectural Design. Eds. Charles Rice, Adrian Lahoud, Anthony Burke. Vol. 80: Wiley, 2010. 58-63. " Architectural Design 80 5 (2010): 58-63.