(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
In connection with the Right Livelihood Award in Stockholm, we meet Eyal Weizman there in December. He has worked with the classical architects at the research institution Forensic Architecture in London for 15 years. He has a long career, many projects that involve investigating all sorts of political and other issues – right now the most pressing is obviously what is happening in GazaHe leads the enormously complex project Cartography of Genocide, where they have, among other things, an online platform with a lot of data. In addition, a comprehensive publication of 827 pages:
“Genocide requires immediate action. There is something about genocide. It still rings a bell in the context of international law, in the conscience of the world, etc. And the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had a very plausible case that genocide is taking place in Gaza. We were contacted by the ICJ and gave them information. They approached us because Forensic Architecture has been working all over the world for the last 14 years. The starting point of our practice is some of the most famous cases in Palestine.
"I have previously written about the Israeli occupation, the Israeli settler colony project in Palestine. So it was natural for them to turn to us for evidence. The 827-page report is actually our largest work. It also consists of a kind of archive – an incredible, terrible, horrific archive. Tens of thousands of pieces of evidence of events, destruction and killing. With genocide, you cross a certain threshold. The evidence requires order and organization at different levels. Like what they wanted to do – whether the intention is to destroy in whole or in part a protected group. This is a complex analysis. But it becomes clearer when the Israeli president says there is no innocence in Gaza; the Ministry of Defense calls the Palestinians ‘human animals’; and the prime minister says they must be treated like the Amalekites – this semi-nomadic ancient people who plagued the Israelites throughout the Bible, and whose mitzvot demanded the extermination of these archenemies, their memory and roots, including their children.” [Mitzvot is a collective term for Judaism's 613 commandments and prohibitions that are enshrined in the Torah. Editor's note]
Journalism and photojournalism
According to Weizman, the analysis contains tens of thousands of data points, divided into the destruction of hospitals, public institutions, attacks on agriculture and other things. The research group is doing what he calls pattern analysis, as the data is not random. You see a cartography in the text. There is a lot of information to process. Weizman calls it forensic architecture ('forensic architecture'):
"20 years ago I presented my first architecture"work during the Israeli occupation and the architecture of warfare, and here I looked more closely at how the soldiers redesigned the city as they attacked it. That was the beginning of Forensic Architecture, the idea of having an archaeological approach to architecture, also to what had just happened. With this we entered into something that was both a media transformation and a political transformation."
“From the investigative journalist’s perspective, things have changed completely.”
This transformed journalism and photojournalism. Photos were combined with available satellite images. Also, available camera phones in the hands of witnesses on the front lines of the conflict who risked their lives to document something. And social media. Much has been written and understood from the perspective of this type of 'citizen journalist'. But from the perspective of the investigative journalist, things have changed completely. Investigative anti-war journalism basically assumed that you had sources in the corridors of power – in the government, in the Department of Defense, in industry. You had to take care of them so that they took care of you. Then you had the big leak. For example, the big stories of Seymour Hersh. This assumed that contacts had to be cultivated; you were always a double agent.
But then came the open source revolution from a bunch of anarchists and internet amateurs. For example, Bellingcat and we at Forensic up at the same time. We don't tend to have contacts in the circles of power. In fact, everything is out there on the Internet. You just have to learn to look again. We looked at one image, found a link to another, and in both of them a link to a third, fourth or fifth. We found these 'swarms' of images on satellite photographs that were linked to audio files of people on the ground. Rather than the old way where you needed someone from the CIA with a guilty conscience who you fed a little bit, and they fed you. Now videos, images and remembered fragments tell parts of a whole story. And to put them together you needed architecture.
Placed In Their 3D Reconstruction Of Al-Ahli Hospital. (Forensic Architecture, 2024)
Investigative Commons
Since the type of work that Forensic Architecture does may sound like it requires 10 employees, it seems timely to ask: How does one actually proceed?
“We are organized in something called the Investigative Commons. 25–30 of us are still at Goldsmiths University of London. We still have a kind of core there.”
"Palestine is obviously a red flag for many foundations."
Weizman began under the title 'Postcolonial Architecture':
"I would say 'decolonial' architecture. We had an office where we decolonized architecture, a kind of art residency. Many of us are now in Stockholm doing amazing things. Some would also call it 'decolonizing architecture'. We are developing techniques and ways of communicating. It can be wild and creative, but also investigations that move from the International Court of Justice in The Hague to major exhibitions. Today there are a dozen offices. I am now going to Rio de Janeiro to help inaugurate another forensic architecture, in another NGO. We have done the same in Bogotá and in Mexico City, Athens and Berlin. But the first office was in Ramallah, where we started together with an organization called al-Haq – which was designated as a terrorist organization by the Israeli authorities.”
It's all funded through grants. But times are tougher now: "Even though most of our work isn't about Palestine, Palestine is obviously a red flag for a lot of foundations."
The Berlin office has its own story: "The Berlin office has had to shrink radically. There we worked on mapping neo-Nazis and German police. Now it's about the Germans' colonial genocide in the media. We want to help German society – I profess to the liberation of Palestine. But a liberation of everyone, including Jews."
Forensic practice
In Weizman's texts, one can see investigations of something happening on a street corner and with 15 different videos from different angles. Here an architectural model is needed. But the question is whether this almost imitates a kind of military logic, since military would work the same way:
"We can say that the history of satellite imagery is the history of the Cold War. And you can say that the history of photography and the history of colonialism intersect in many ways. And we call our work counter forensics, a forensic technique against the state – as a tool for civil society or social movements to investigate the state.”
“It is the quality of the evidence that counts.”
"Traditional forensic practice operates within three different rules or zones. Number one is to seal off the site, a kind of state of emergency. The second is that the laboratory is a hermetic place that operates according to its own rules, and with certain experts. The third is the court, which is the most ritualized in the space. We operate a kind of forensics that tries to break these three zones. When it is the state that is behind the murders, and then seals off the area, they control that zone. But photographs are leaked from the sealed area. Or sometimes it is just the memory of someone who remembers and wants to tell. And the 'laboratory' is not a hermetic and hygienic space, but is soiled by all kinds of media agents and collaborators. And we only work together with the victims – something forensic scientists would never do. We do not call ourselves neutral. It is the quality of the evidence that counts. We often have collaborations between artists, architects, scientists, lawyers and journalists – so it is a kind of messy space. And some it is a collaboration with a court.”
Seeing the worst
But isn't this historically a different or counterproductive sense of what architecture is – that is, architecture as a productive project with a positive plan for the future?
"We see people on the worst days of their lives. We see the worst human behavior, the worst, deepest grief and pain."
“I don’t know. I mean, we in Forensic Architecture tend to see the worst things. We see people on the worst days of their lives. We see the worst human behavior, the worst, deepest grief and pain. What we’re actually doing is framing the past to reproduce a past idea. This is architecture in the sense that it’s an interaction between people and the environment, but it’s not architecture in the way that you would think of it, you know, as a beautifying community building.”
"Our work makes you think differently about architectural practice. Forensic Architecture had a collaboration with David Wingrove and David Graeber, who has written Dawn of Everything (2021) – a fantastic book about ‘architecture’ where they discover things that are different – for example, non-hierarchical societies based on new archaeological discoveries from the last few decades. Together with Wingrove we made a work for the Venice Biennale – an incredible intellectual challenge. As I said to him: ‘Everywhere in the book you and Graeber have written, new evidence emerges that turns our understanding upside down.’ It’s about evidence like technology, methodology, and what has actually happened within archaeology itself that has made it possible for the evidence to emerge.”
Weizman concludes by pointing out that politics is really about architecture's deep past and potentially its deep future.
Published and abridged with permission from SITE ZONE. Translated by MODERN TIMES editor. Watch video interview https://www.sitezones.net/studio-conversations/eyal-weizmanforensic-architecture
