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Overview
Beyond shedding new light on human rights violations and state crimes across the globe, Forensic Architecture has also created a new form of investigative practice that bears its name. The group uses architecture as an optical device to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction, as well as to cross-reference a variety of evidence sources, such as new media, remote sensing, material analysis, witness testimony, and crowd-sourcing.
In Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, the group’s founder, provides, for the first time, an in-depth introduction to the history, practice, assumptions, potentials, and double binds of this practice. The book includes an extensive array of images, maps, and detailed documentation that records the intricate work the group has performed.
Included in this volume are case studies that traverse multiple scales and durations, ranging from the analysis of the shrapnel fragments in a room struck by drones in Pakistan, the reconstruction of a contested shooting in the West Bank, the architectural recreation of a secret Syrian detention center from the memory of its survivors, a blow-by-blow account of a day-long battle in Gaza, and an investigation of environmental violence and climate change in the Guatemalan highlands and elsewhere.
Weizman’s Forensic Architecture, stunning and shocking in its critical narrative, powerful images, and daring investigations, presents a new form of public truth, technologically, architecturally, and aesthetically produced. Their practice calls for a transformative politics in which architecture as a field of knowledge and a mode of interpretation exposes and confronts ever-new forms of state violence and secrecy.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781935408871 |
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Publisher: | Zone Books |
Publication date: | 10/18/2019 |
Series: | Zone Books |
Edition description: | Reprint |
Pages: | 368 |
Product dimensions: | 7.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Preface 9
Introduction: At the Threshold of Detectability 13
Negative Positivism 17
Toward a Forensic Architecture 18
Drone Vision 22
Visual Extraterritorialization 31
Pattern of Drone Strikes 34
Under the Veil of Resolution 36
The Architecture of Memory 44
Part 1 What Is Forensic Architecture? 49
Cracks: Lines of Least Resistance 55
Conflict Surveyors 57
Staro Sajmište: The Inverted Horizon 60
Forensis 64
Counterforensics 68
A Knock on the Roof 72
Engaged Objectivity 74
White Phosphorous 76
The Forensic Turn 78
The Era of the Witness 80
Saydnaya: Inside a Syrian Torture Prison 85
Forensic Aesthetics 94
Image Space 97
Before and After 101
Locating Air Strikes in Syria 104
Abu Rahma: From Video to Virtual Modeling 108
Patterns 114
Counterpatterns 116
Field Causality 118
Guatemala: Environmental Violence 121
The Landscape Against the State 125
The Truth in Ruins 128
Part 2 Counterforensics in Palestine 131
The Forensic Dilemma 133
Architecture Against Architects 137
Political Forms and Forces 138
"Counter-Cartography" 140
Precedents 141
The Pyramids of Gaza 143
Ruins in Inverse 144
Lawfare 145
The NAKBA day Killing 149
Intersections 154
Hannibal in Rafah 165
Rafah, Black Friday, August 1, 2014 169
The Timeline 171
The Prisoner's Dilemma 175
Hannibal Unleashed 180
Image Space 186
Air: Nephanalysis of Bomb Clouds 191
Subsoil: The Underground Manhunt 196
To Kill a Dead Man 210
Meanwhile… 211
Postscript: Trial As Denial 212
Part 3 Ground Truths 215
"A Tribe Against a State" 219
The Aridity Line 228
The Conflict Shoreline 233
Meteorological Traces 236
Negev Settlements, Vegetation, and Precipitation 238
The Bedouin Nakba 239
The Politics of Drought 241
Plant Vigor as a Political Sensor 250
Al-'ARAQIB in 1998, 2002, 2008, and 2014 252
Colonialism and Climate Change 253
The Climate of the Naqab's History 258
The Testimony of the Weather 264
Orientalist Meteorology 268
The Earth Photograph 274
Military Archaeology 283
Life at the Threshold of Detectability 288
Postscript: The Slow Violence of the "Split Second" 301
Acknowledgments 307
Notes 311
Index 359
What People are Saying About This
In many respects Forensic Architecture is the current reincarnation of Soviet Russia's Factography, a collective enterprise that, in the 1920's and 30's, was geared towards the construction of facts, as opposed to merely documenting them. The difference between both endeavors, each similarly brazen in taking advantage of unprecedented advances of media technology, is that the facts that Forensic Architecture wishes to (re)construct are for the most part acts of state violence that the perpetrating state deliberately conceals. Those facts are registered in buildings (or traces thereof), which Weizman and his team equate both to photographs (sensors) and to tools for decoding other sensors (such as the clouds of smoke hovering over a bombed city). Analyzing the vast bank of images provided by social media in conflict zones through a computation of differential parallaxes, Forensic Architecture is fast becoming the most efficient visual machine against the suppression of evidence by the authors of crimes against humanity. Recent history tells us that its work will be evermore needed.
The investigative work of Eyal Weizman and his colleagues at Forensic Architecture is truly remarkable, breaking novel theoretical ground while actively supporting struggles for justice. Again and again, landscapes of power, violence, resistance and ecological stress are transformed in stunning new ways. Among the many revelations in these pages is a new mapping of the connections between climate-change, drought, drones and armed conflict. These are powerful analytic tools that will be indispensable to the construction of a new human rights framework.
In a world where environmental crimes are increasingly linked to human rights violations,Forensic Architecturehasbecome an essential practice. Weizman and his team have understood how the tools of science and architecture can influence and transform the juridical system.
Baltasar Garzón, former Spanish investigating judge and president of the human rights foundation FIBGAR“The investigative work of Eyal Weizman and his colleagues at Forensic Architecture is truly remarkable, breaking novel theoretical ground while actively supporting struggles for justice. Again and again, landscapes of power, violence, resistance, and ecological stress are transformed in stunning new ways. Among the many revelations in these pages is a new mapping of the connections between climate change, drought, drones, and armed conflict. These are powerful analytic tools that will be indispensable to the construction of a new human rights framework.”— Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine
“Analyzing the vast bank of images provided by social media in conflict zones through a computation of differential parallaxes, Forensic Architecture is fast becoming the most efficient visual machine against the suppression of evidence by the authors of crimes against humanity. Recent history tells us that its work will be evermore needed.”— Yve-Alain Bois, Professor of Art History, Institute for Advanced Study“In a world where environmental crimes are increasingly linked to human rights violations, Forensic Architecture has become an essential practice. Weizman and his team have understood how the tools of science and architecture can influence and transform the juridical system.” — Baltasar Garzón, former Spanish investigating judge and president of the human rights foundation FIBGAR