As part of the Walker's presentation of Designs for Different Futures (2020), we have been publishing a number of texts from the exhibition catalogue (Yale University Press, December 2019), exploring the ways in which designers create, critique, and question possible futures, big and small. The exhibition was organized by the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
This conversation took place by Skype on January 31, 2019, with Eyal Weizman at his home in London and exhibition co-curator Maite Borjabad López-Pastor at her home in Chicago.
MB
How did you come to establish your research agency, Forensic Architecture [FA]?
EW
I was taking a year off [in 1996] from the AA [Architectural Association School of Architecture, London] and volunteering at the Planning Ministry of the Palestinian National Authority. The ministry realized that the Palestinians were not getting all the maps from their Israeli counterparts during the Oslo Accords. So they sent me to open archives in Israel to get maps of the area for them—geographical, geological, and infrastructural maps, as well as satellite and aerial images. Then I began to understand cartography’s power as a tool of domination. Israel dominated the terrain because it dominated its representation.
After my studies I went back to Jerusalem. It was 2000 and the second intifada had begun. Edward Said wrote a very important piece in the London Review of Books calling for the counter-cartography of Palestine.1 If cartography is the tool of the dominating, then counter-cartography is cartography from the point of view of the oppressed. Counter-cartography draws and maps violations of rights or land claims from the perspective of those experiencing violence, rather than presenting the perspective of colonialists.
In 2002 I arranged a project to map the West Bank that involved flying over and driving through and measuring things, and at the end of it I produced the first detailed map of the West Bank with all the settlements and other things that were not yet in the public domain. A lot of legal action was undertaken on the basis of that map. In 2005, more or less, this type of on-the-ground cartography became redundant as satellite images became available through Google Earth and other platforms. So counter-cartography had to deal with the new reality of media, the multiplicity of media. It had to deal with photographs from the ground, videos, and satellite images. Counter-cartography turned into counter-forensics, and the scale of time and the scale of space had to shift. Video or satellite images capture snapshots of time, events or the results of events or incidents, and the big scale and scope became new things to explore.
I think many people were thinking about territories and territorial relations then, and we all were understanding that there can be a geopolitics in an instant. Eruptive, split-second incidents can have great political consequences. These incidents aren’t about just space but also time, and we need different technologies to assimilate the two. So the practice of forensic architecture really emerged from this need. But it also emerged out of a set of discussions that were taking place at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths [University of London], a program I established outside mainstream architectural education, at a university that didn’t have an architecture department.
All sorts of professional and academic refugees came to the center to do something new with architecture, understanding that architectural intelligence could be used as a way to interrogate the world around us. Together with John Palmesino, Adrian Lahoud, Susan Schuppli, Ayesha Hameed, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Céline Condorelli, Hannah Martin, and many others, we came up with a methodology and history and theory of new forensic practices, or counter-forensic practices.
MB
That is really inspiring and actually key to understanding FA’s practice within the field of architecture. There are many issues concerning means of representation and visibility that challenge the discipline of architecture itself. For instance, there is the issue of who holds the means of representation and thereby constructs or validates standards. In the moment we are living in right now—with the political right rising around the globe, in Hungary, Turkey, Poland, and Brazil, and as evidenced by Brexit in the UK and the Trump administration in the US—facts and the means of their verification are at stake. How does FA’s work help redefine unstable terms such as data or information or visibility?
EW
When we first established FA, our friends and colleagues who work in the critical mode and deal with a critique of technology and knowledge production were extremely skeptical about our approach to technology and even our approach to the notion of truth. Many people felt that the turn to forensics was counterintuitive—anticritical perhaps. Those two terms, forensic and architecture, bring with them disciplinary and regulatory frameworks and rely heavily on expertise and authority. But somehow when you put those two words together, each one starts destabilizing the other a little bit. Also the political meaning of truth has changed.
I think that people in the metropolitan West now understand better what it means to live in a world of misrepresentation, like the one that every activist confronting state violation knows all too well. It is a state attack on verification that is referred to as “post-truth.” The populist right insurgency you mentioned is targeting not so much this fact or the other, but the very way facts are produced, the way they’re checked, sustained, verified, etc. But anyone living under a regime of domination or in the frontier of the colonial present has understood this all along. There is no colonialism without post-truth. It’s part of domination and colonialism to plant facts, to produce violence and dispossession, and to continuously lie about having done that. This is precisely the reason that Israel withheld maps from Palestinians. So controlling truth production and controlling space and people are entangled.
When the West colonizes, the colonizers employ their science or, sometimes, pseudo-science, like phrenology and physiognomy, to justify theft. Or they ignore and dismiss any criticisms or protests made against them, any claims that they are violating human rights. So the whale that has beached itself in the metropolitan West has been with us all along. And we know the smell.
MB
Absolutely! That brings us to the question of how the production of trust and truth itself is not only part of oppressive systems but is also the core of the counter-system FA is trying to advance, since the agency uses the same means of surveilling and controlling to propose counterfacts and alternative narratives. What are the challenges in using the same tools those you critique are using? What challenges did you face during the investigation into the killing of Yakub Musa Abu al-Qi’an in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran (see here for more information on this incident, and the video featured in the exhibition Designs for Different Futures), not only in terms of reconstructing what happened that night but also in reclaiming your findings as the truth?
EW
We need to establish verification not just as a function of authority or of absolute perspectival expertise. In fact, the challenge of the post-true can be quite useful. So when somebody says that we need to question experts and institutions, vested interests, and institutional authority, I completely agree. We need to break the monopoly various state technocrats have over the production of truth. But at the site of the ruin of that old established institutional conception of truth, something else needs to grow. The question is what that is. Is it the populist method of just saying what you want, usually things that end up supporting the strongmen? Or should the construction of truth be thought of differently, as a multiperspectival practice, a network of relations between institutions and communities and activists and scientists and artists that, taken together, will produce both verification as a truth practice and the means of its dissemination?
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Forensic Architecture, Killing in Umm al-Hiran, 2019. Installed in Designs for Different Futures at the Walker Art Center, 2020. Photo: Walker Art Center. -
Forensic Architecture, Killing in Umm al-Hiran, 2019. Installed in Designs for Different Futures at the Walker Art Center, 2020. Photo: Walker Art Center. -
Forensic Architecture, Killing in Umm al-Hiran, 2019. Installed in Designs for Different Futures at the Walker Art Center, 2020. Photo: Walker Art Center.
Umm al-Hiran is one of the best examples of truth functioning not as a noun, like veritas, but as a practice, verification. The State of Israel raided Umm al-Hiran, a place where FA knew many people because we had been active in the area for a long time. They raided at night. They killed a resident [Abu al-Qi’an], probably by mistake. They said he was a terrorist, and they concocted a story that he [intentionally] ran over a policeman. Many in the press accepted the government’s version and disseminated it further. An activist who was on the ground, Keren Manor, was filming part of the event in the dark, not knowing what she saw. She captured the sound of the event. Combining this with thermal imaging shot from a police helicopter and with testimonies of people on the ground, and then reenacting the events with the community there, we were able to prove that what actually happened was that the police first shot at this man, who was in his car. Because they shot him, his car started rolling down the hill and hit a policeman, killing him. It’s a very, very different story from what the state claimed happened, and it is very important to tell it that way.
We are not always able to present material in the courts because they are state controlled, so we had to disseminate this material in the media, on social media, and in exhibitions. We were able to use the funding we got from Tate Britain to submit our material as evidence in court, in an attempt to charge the policemen who killed Abu al-Qi’an.
MB
So it seems cultural and artistic institutions like Tate Britain are your allies in this strategy. Understanding truth as a practice, and not actually as a static noun, the question then becomes which forums of truth production and which platforms you can use to perform those counter-forensic narratives. Could you explain how the invitation to Documenta 14 helped FA investigate Andreas Temme’s testimony of the murder of Halit Yozgat?2
EW
The problem of counter-forensics is a problem of access to two spaces. One space is the scene of the crime. The state puts up a cordon and does not allow you past it. When the state is the alleged criminal and they also undertake the investigation, they can fabricate a cover-up. The second space we cannot access is forums of truth production, like the courts. Sometimes the court protects the Secret Service or the police when they perform illegal actions. So we have to find alternatives to entering these spaces and use our methodologies to gather information that goes beyond the police cordon—testimonies of people who were there, or videos or sound recordings, or any police leaks. In the case of Umm al-Hiran, we had all of the above. We had the villagers telling their stories, which were very important for the production of truth. We had Keren Manor’s video. We had a leak from pathology. In Germany, the murder of Yozgat by neo-Nazis in the presence of a Secret Service agent was not dissimilar. We did not have access to the crime scene, but a leak put the police investigation and photographs in the public domain. We were able to reconstruct the entire investigation from the leak.
In both cases, we could not enter the courts. To build pressure, we needed to enlist, again, our privilege and ability to approach popular art forums. We exhibited our entire investigation of Yozgat’s murder at Documenta 14 in Kassel, the same city where the murder was committed. We chose the site nearest to the crime scene, and we brought it to the attention of many people—members of the public, but also policemen, police academies, politicians from all parties, and lawyers. It was presented initially in such a small place that hardly anyone could see it. Later it was presented in many other cultural venues across Germany and became a major reference point in understanding this case.
MB
FA’s power and reputation relies heavily on its ability to disseminate its findings and mobilize interest across diverse platforms. In that regard, what is your most ambitious vision, looking forward?
EW
I think forensic architecture needs to become a field rather than a practice. It is important to us that other civil society groups are able to use our methodologies. We’re training activists in other places. And we are developing our technology continuously. We are now dealing with new frontiers of technological possibilities, with machine vision and artificial intelligence, to build tools that can detect crimes that have not yet taken place.
MB
When I first visited the FA office in London, I was surprised that there wasn’t a much larger group of people present, considering FA’s significant achievements. I remember there was an open space where several people were working, but I wasn’t able to identify who was doing what, or the logic or order of production that was taking place. Somehow the fluid feeling of the space spoke so much about the interdisciplinary nature of the FA team.
EW
We are larger now, about twenty people. More than half of us are architects. Others are coders, investigative journalists, filmmakers, artists, and lawyers, as well
as scientists and an archeologist. So yes, absolutely, the fluid understanding of disciplines is key to us. The problems of the world do not arrange themselves according to disciplines that were conceived of in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There’s no point in seeing a discipline as a prison; rather, architecture is like an airport for us. We want to take off from architecture and go to different destinations, explore different things, and meet different people.
MB
I know you not only develop your own projects but also collaborate with many platforms and diverse organizations that count on you. How do you select your cases? What is that process?
EW
I love commissions, because I like to be surprised by what we can do. People approach us from Mexico, for instance, with an issue that we would never know or think about, or a delegation from Ukraine or from Greece makes a request. I love it. Because the problem with us academics is that we just keep on digging into our own obsessions. Traveling around the world and sharing our expertise with people is a privilege. We have investiga-tions that we identify, but most are commissions. Some of them are paid commissions from human rights groups, whether it is the UN or Doctors without Borders. And we have pro bono work as well. We have many more requests than we can answer. But if the job allows us to innovate—if we can invent something new or test new strategies to advance the field of forensic architecture—then we take the project.
MB
So to solve new investigations, there is a parallel need to develop new methodologies that can then be extrapolated and applied to other cases to keep advancing the discipline.
EW
Exactly. The challenge is to resolve cases while also questioning our methodologies and figuring out new ways to implement the work we’ve already done to move forward.
MB
To conclude, could you briefly share who has inspired you in your work? Who constitutes the intellectual ecosystem you inhabit?
EW
I’m a child of post-structuralism. We need to understand how to deconstruct official statements and assemble networks and complex relations. We need to do our Deleuzian readings and use them to evaluate—to make a new subdiscipline, or a new science. We need to look at Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. And in terms of art, there’s of course a long list of friends and colleagues we admire and learn from constantly. ▪︎
EYAL WEIZMAN is the founding director of Forensic Architecture and professor of spatial and visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he founded the Centre for Research Architecture. He was a Global Scholar at Princeton University and a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He serves on the boards of the International Criminal Court and the Centre for Investigative Journalism and is a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine.
MAITE BORJABAD LÓPEZ-PASTOR is the Neville Bryan Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago where she has led numerous acquisitions and has curated a number of significant exhibitions. Her recent projects at the museum include the exhibition with Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rhame: If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust (July 2021–January 2022). Her work revolves around diverse forms of critical spatial practices, operating across architecture, art, and performance. She was the author and curator of Scenographies of Power: From the State of Exception to the Spaces of Exception (2017).
The catalogue was produced by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with design by the Walker Art Center. It was edited and conceived by the exhibition’s curators: Emmet Byrne, Design Director and Associate Curator of Design, Walker Art Center; Kathryn B. Hiesinger, The J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator and Michelle Millar Fisher, formerly The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator in the department of European Decorative Arts after 1700, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, and Zoë Ryan, formerly the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Text and compilation © 2019 Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, and The Art Institute of Chicago
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