Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability

by Eyal Weizman

Overview

In recent years, a little-known research group named Forensic Architecture began using novel research methods to undertake a series of investigations into human rights abuses. Today, the group provides crucial evidence for international courts and works with a wide range of activist groups, NGOs, Amnesty International, and the UN.

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
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

Eyal Weizman is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London and a Global Scholar at Princeton University. A founder of Forensic Architecture, he is also a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine. His books include Mengele's Skull, The Least of All Possible Evils, and Hollow Land.

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

Yve-Alain Bois

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.

Naomi Klein

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.

Endorsement

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

From the Publisher

“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

Editorial Reviews

"Forensic Architecture highlights critical issues that must be discussed, as uncomfortable as they make people feel…. The book exposes readers to a candid, much-needed understanding of the relationship between settlements, architecture, politics, and violence. This awareness is even more important in developed countries whose advocacy is necessary for wrongdoings like those described within the book to be recognized."

Spacing

"As the director of Forensic Architecture, Weizman has invented a new academic discipline, perhaps even a whole new science, a committed, engaged, citizen science. . . . Weizman has found a way to harness our everyday digital diversions, for a fierce, moral purpose."

Wired

"The perspective shift he offers is no less than the image of a planet overrun by human machinations. Weizman presents the idea of human history written only by and for nation states, not their people. When we conceive of justice for ourselves and the world, that lens is always prefigured for the state viewpoint. But perhaps through experts like Weizman and his colleagues at Forensic Architecture, total control of that lens can be wrested little by little, to accommodate those who need it most."

New Scientist

"As the director of Forensic Architecture, Weizman has invented a new academic discipline, perhaps even a whole new science, a committed, engaged, citizen science. . . . Weizman has found a way to harness our everyday digital diversions, for a fierce, moral purpose."

Wired

"This forensic process—what Weizman calls ‘architecture in reverse’—shows how the analytical and presentational skills of architects can be deployed in graphic, damning detail, in circumstances that extend way beyond the comfort zone of the drawing board."

Guardian

This forensic process—what Weizman calls 'architecture in reverse'—shows how the analytical and presentational skills of architects can be deployed in graphic, damning detail, in circumstances that extend way beyond the comfort zone of the drawing board.

—Guardian

The perspective shift he offers is no less than the image of a planet overrun by human machinations. Weizman presents the idea of human history written only by and for nation states, not their people. When we conceive of justice for ourselves and the world, that lens is always prefigured for the state viewpoint. But perhaps through experts like Weizman and his colleagues at Forensic Architecture, total control of that lens can be wrested little by little, to accommodate those who need it most.

—New Scientist

Forensic Architecture highlights critical issues that must be discussed, as uncomfortable as they make people feel…. The book exposes readers to a candid, much-needed understanding of the relationship between settlements, architecture, politics, and violence. This awareness is even more important in developed countries whose advocacy is necessary for wrongdoings like those described within the book to be recognized.

—Spacing

From the Publisher

Forensic Architecturehighlights critical issues thatmustbe discussed, as uncomfortable as they make people feel…. The book exposes readers to a candid, much-needed understanding of the relationship between settlements, architecture, politics, and violence. This awareness is even more important in developed countries whose advocacy is necessary for wrongdoings like those described within the book to be recognized.

—Spacing

Reviews