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From the analysis of shrapnel fragments in a room struck by drones in Pakistan, to a recreation of a secret Syrian detention centre, forensic architects are using new research methods to expose state violence, war crimes and human rights violations.
Architecture is typically understood as a creative process, a discipline concerned with the process of construction, the ways in our material world is built.
Eyal Weizman, however, is interested in architecture as destruction, that is, the often contested site at which violence and architecture intersect.
Professor Weizman is the principal investigator at Forensic Architecture, an agency that undertakes independent research and presents evidence to international courts, truth commissions and the UN.
"A forensic architect is like a pathologist of a building. What we do is look at destroyed elements of a building and try to explain what has happened around it," he says.
"We become something like archaeologists of the very recent past, trying to figure out what has happened by looking at the shape of architectural ruins."
Finding truth in a media-saturated age
Professor Weizman explained that in places like Gaza or Syria it has historically been very difficult for architects, investigators and journalists to access sites where violence has taken place.
Today, however, social media offers forensic architects a rich source of documentary evidence around which they can build a coherent narrative of otherwise contested acts of violence.
The analysis of social media images has radically expanded the scope of these investigations and has allowed a much more complicated story to be told.
"There are always gaps in what we know," Professor Weizman says.
"When we see those viral videos of police violence in the US, perpetrator and victim are always in the same frame; the video tells the entire story, so to speak.
"But for every video like that, there are hundreds of others taken just before, or just after, from different angles, that is, material that needs to be composed."
This process of composition and recreation requires attention to the invisible, as much as to the visible.
"In Gaza we had to compose about 7,000 images of a single day of violence that unfolded in the 2014 war," he says.
"The only way to do it is to build an architectural model and locate each one of those sources in space and simulated time and move from one image to another in order to tell a story that unfolds between images rather than within images."
He says the emergence of the discipline of forensic architecture reveals a defining feature of contemporary conflict — that today, most wars take place within cities.
"Whether in Aleppo or Gaza or Eastern Ukraine ... architecture becomes an important frame through which to understand violence," he said.
Piecing together fragments of memories
Recently, Forensic Architecture investigated a notorious Syrian prison from which independent investigators and human rights organisations had been forbidden from entering.
Through Amnesty International they were introduced to five survivors of the prison who were living as refugees in Turkey.
They attempted to reconstruct their architectural memories of a building that was described by Amnesty International as an architectural instrument of torture.
"We reconstructed with each of the survivors their perception of the prison," Professor Weizman says.
"The problem was each one of those witnesses was blindfolded so they couldn't really see the space.
"They heard the space, they counted steps, they counted doorways, so each one had a slightly distorted model of the building."
But memories of violence are rarely coherent, ordered records that can be easily recalled, he says.
After having endured prolonged physical and psychological torture, most of the eyewitnesses had blanked out different parts of the building.
Between the five survivors, however, it was possible to pull together fragments of memories, like a series of images, to create a coherent sequence and approximate the architecture of the building.
"For the first time we could give a kind of rendering of what it is like to be in a place that is otherwise a complete black hole," Professor Weizman says.
During the process, Professor Weizman discovered that eyewitnesses were able to remember crucial pieces of information that they may not have recalled in a standard oral deposition.
"Our memory is a spatial thing," he says. "Our memory is an architectural machine, if you like.
"When you locate somebody in a realistic rendering of a space, sometimes repressed memories, the most difficult memories to retain, will come back."
The threshold of detectability
When Professor Weizman and his team were investigating American drone strikes they found the missiles left a signature on buildings: a small hole in the roof. They had to rely on satellite images, but those images have very real limits and make the job of investigators almost impossible.
"The size of the pixel, that is the limit of visibility, in a satellite image is 50cm squared on the ground, while the size of the hole is 30cm squared. So you cannot see those holes from the satellite image, they simply become part of the pixel," he says.
Forensic architecture, then, takes place at the threshold of detectability, that is, the state of visibility at which an object hovers on the brink of being observable or not.
"We always have to be more creative than state and intelligence agencies," Professor Weizman says.
"State forensics is based on a simple principle: the investigators must know more than the criminal. In counter-forensics — civil society forensics that look at state crimes — you have less visibility, you look at things in lower resolution and know less than the perpetrators.
"Here, architecture takes another meaning; it becomes a creative practice of assembling, building models, thinking through solutions, operating under the threshold of detectability."
Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, architecture, history, law-crime-and-justice, internet-technology, syrian-arab-republic
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