Forensic Architecture in an independent research agency that investigates state and corporate violence, especially when it impacts upon the built environment. Its interdisciplinary team of investigators is made up of architects, scholars, artists, filmmakers, software developers, investigative journalists, archaeologists, lawyers and scientists.
The Forensic Architecture case study teams produce evidence files comprising of building surveys, models, animations, video analyses and interactive cartographies, and present them in forums ranging from the general media to international courts, truth commissions and citizen tribunals. Their case studies are often presented to the general public as exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world.
In 2017, Forensic Architecture showcased a selection of their investigations at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City. The exhibition was titled Forensic Architecture: Hacia una Estetica Investigativa (Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics).
Below are three of the case studies exhibited:
The Ayotzinapa Case in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico
On 26 September 2014, students from the Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa were attacked in the town of Iguala, by local police in collusion with criminal organisations. Other branches of the Mexican security apparatus either participated in or witnessed the events, including state and federal police, and the military. Six people were murdered, including three students, and 43 students were forcibly disappeared – their whereabouts remains unknown. Forensic Architecture, following extensive research, believes the Mexican state has failed the victims by constructing a fraudulent and inconsistent narrative of that night’s events.
The agency collaborated with the Equipo Argentino de Antropologia Forense (EAAF) and Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez (Centro Prodh) to conceive an interactive cartographic platform to map out and examine the different narratives of this event. The project aims to reconstruct, the entirety of the known events that took place that night and to provide a forensic tool for researchers to further the investigation.
Operation Sofia in Guatemala
Between 1978 and 1984, according to Guatemala’s Commission for Historical Clarification, the Guatemalan state security forces (both military and military-organized civil militias) inflicted acts of genocide on the Ixil Maya people in West Guatemala.
Genocide also includes the destruction of the natural and built environment as part of a military strategy. In 1982 Operación Sofia was implemented by the government, and in 2009, the NSA made the documentation of this operation available to the public. The documentation laid out the military plan of scorched earth offenses – to destroy crops, homes, community buildings, animals and the land that supported their way of life. The aim was to eradicate the Ixil Maya culture in order to bring them under the control of the state.
Forensic Architecture’s research on the environmental violence was designed to complement other studies of the conflict. Their research was presented in the form of a web-based interactive cartography produced in collaboration with SITU Research. The research was included in a series of trials taking place in Guatemala, including the retrial of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt in the National Court of Guatemala and in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Ecocide in Indonesia
In 2015, fires in the Indonesian territories Kalimantan and Sumatra consumed over 21,000 square kilometers of forest and peat lands. The fumes from approximately 130,000 sources combined into a cloud, measured at a few hundred kilometers long and a few kilometers thick. It contained more carbon, methane, ammonium and cyanide than those produced by the entire annual emissions of the German, British or Japanese industries.
Forensic Architecture states that some of the roots of the fires can be traced to the political repression and mass killings undertaken by the Indonesian government since 1965, when local and international companies collaborated with the armed forces to seize vast tracts of land from indigenous populations.
Between 1967 and 1996 the privatization of public forested land for the development of the agricultural industry led to widespread deforestation. The 2015 fires took place mainly in dried peat lands made up of thousand-year-old decomposed organic matter. In their undisturbed, swamped state, peat lands are fire-resistant, but decades of canal digging by large agribusiness operators had drained and dried the peat to prepare it for the monoculture plantation of palm oil – making it extremely flammable. The footage above shows similar fires in Amazonian forests and forests of the Congo.
Further information
Forensic Architecture is an independent research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, first set up in 2010.
www.forensic-architecture.org
@ForensicArchi
*Main article image is a photograph from an art installation by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, titled Saydnaya, an acoustic investigation into Syrian regime prison where 13000+ people have been executed since 2011 ©Tropical Commons, 2017
