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Forensic Architecture: The Place of Law in War

In 2011 I was awarded a four-year ERC starting grant of €1.2 million. The project introduces a new field – ‘Forensic Architecture’ (FA) – which uses architectural methodologies to provide new types of spatial evidence in the context of human rights investigations (HR) and those of international humanitarian law (IHL). FA includes two distinct parts: the first – “investigations” – includes the collection of evidence of human rights abuses, for e.g in relation to the Guatemalan Civil War, the death of African migrants in the Mediterranean, the use of white phosphorus munitions by the Israel and the US militaries. FA had a leading role in the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights’ inquiry of drone warfare in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Palestine. Our work was presented in various fora including the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva and the General Assembly in NYC, the Israeli High Court of Justice, the national courts of Italy and France, the Interamerican Court of Human Rights. The second part of the project engaged with the historical, theoretical and critical investigation of contemporary forensic practices. It aimed to evaluate the epistemologies, assumptions, protocols, and politics of knowledge production on which contemporary forensics is based.

We organized a number of exhibitions and symposia in leading universities and cultural institutions world wide, and contributed to internationally recognized publications. An exhibition at the Portikus Gallery in Frankfurt dealt with the shift in HR practices from the so-called “era of the witness” to an emergent “forensic aesthetics”. The (note)book Forensic Architecture (dOCUMENTA13 2012), introduced the FA project in an art and cultural context. In 2011 I have also co-edited a special issue of Cabinet Magazine on Forensics, in which work produced in the context of the project was presented.