Eyal Weizman's Introduction to Forensics PDF

Introduction: Forensis Eyal Weizman Forensis is Latin for “pertaining to the forum” and is the origin of the term forensics. The Roman forum to which forensics pertained was a multidimen- sional space of politics, law and economy, but the word has since undergone a s...

Introduction: Forensis Eyal Weizman Forensis is Latin for “pertaining to the forum” and is the origin of the term forensics. The Roman forum to which forensics pertained was a multidimen- sional space of politics, law and economy, but the word has since undergone a strong linguistic drift: the forum gradually came to refer exclusively to the court of law, and forensics to the use of medicine and science within it.1 This telescoping of the term meant that a critical dimension of the practice of forensics was lost in the process of its modernization—namely its potential as a political practice. This book returns to forensis in order to reorient the practice of contem- porary forensics and expand it. The aim here is to bring new material and aesthetic sensibilities to bear upon the legal and political implications of state violence, armed conflict and climate change. But rather than being limited to presentation in the legal domain alone, forensis seeks to perform across a multiplicity of forums, political and juridical, institutional and informal. Forensis is here employed as the operative concept of a critical practice, one that is committed to investigating the actions of states and corporations and also to critical reflection on the terms by which contemporary forensic investigations—on the scales of bodies, buildings, territories and their digi- tal representation—are currently undertaken. This book therefore presents both the forensic investigations undertaken by its different authors and a set of critical examinations of the prevalent status of forensics in articulating contemporary notions of public truth. In relation to the latter, forensis is used to interrogate the relation between the two constitutive sites of forensics—namely fields and forums. In forensic terms the division is straightforward: the field is the site of investi- gation and the forum is the place where the results of an investigation are presented and contested. However, both these sites must be understood to be more than mere locational designations. The field is not only a neutral, abstract grid on which traces of a crime can be plotted out, but itself a dynamic and elastic territory, a force field that is shaped by but also shapes conflict. The forum, in turn, is a composite apparatus. It is constituted as a shifting triangulation between three elements: a contested object or site, an interpreter tasked with translating “the language of things,” and the assembly of a public gathering. Forensis thus establishes a relation between the animation of material objects and the gathering of political collectives.2 This relation resembles what the Roman rhetorician Quintilian called prosopopoeia—the mediated speech of inanimate objects.3 Small things such as commodities, coins, statues, or weapons could be physically handled, Introduction 9 presented and traded in the forum. Sometimes—as in the story of the bronze This book was assembled as a methodological experiment moving along statue of the athlete Theagenes of Thasos that fell and crushed a man who concrete example of forensis two trajectories. On the one hand it was produced in the context of a scorned it—objects could even be tried, convicted, and sentenced (the statue “forensic agency” established at the Centre for Research Architecture at in this case was put on trial for murder, convicted and punished by being cast Goldsmiths in 2011 under the name of Forensic Architecture. This agency into the sea).4 Things too far away, too abstract or too large—such as cities, was unique in that its members—architects, artists, filmmakers and theo- resources, rivers, territories or states—had to be brought vividly to life by the rists—the ferociously creative fellows, students and members of the Centre, power of an aural demonstration. They had to be made evident (visible), cred- rather than qualified scientists and pathologists, were those undertaking the ible and persuasive. Quintilian called this form of presentation evidentia in investigations. We set our research agenda and chose each of the investiga- narratione—a manner of presentation “in which a truth requires not merely tions according to our political interests and commitments, and in order to to be told, but to a certain extent obtruded.”5 Contemporary modes of interrogate the ways in which new types of evidence can affect political and prosopopoeia animate material objects or landscapes by converting them into legal processes. Together with different partner organizations,9 we investi- data and image. gated the actions of states and corporations and offered our analyses to civil This complicates the relation between the component parts that make society organizations, NGOs, activist groups, and prosecutors, who have forensic speech. Objects are animated in the process of presentation, referred presented them in various legal and political forums. to as if they were human subjects; as a famous forensic anthropologist once put On the other hand our work emerged as a body of historical, theoretical it, “bones make great witnesses,” before going on to pose questions to them in and artistic research into contemporary forensic practices, in order to criti- court.6 The interpreters, meanwhile, are no longer necessarily people or experts cally evaluate their epistemologies, assumptions, protocols, and politics of but also automated or semi-automated technologies of detection and imaging. knowledge production. Finally, forums are no longer confined to arena-like buildings, but become These component parts of our work were interdependent, but also increasingly diffused across a wide spectrum of sites and media forms. came into tension with each other, sometimes even into contradiction (how This book is an interrogation of what could be understood as the “forensic could a responsible “expert” critique the concept of truth?). But rather than turn”—an emergent sensibility attuned to material investigation that has become seeing the tension between practice and critique as a problem that needs to increasingly evident not only in contemporary law and the fields of human and be resolved by choosing one or the other, we found in this problematization environmental science, but also in popular entertainment.7 Within the context a productive resource that intensified our research process. This tension of our forensic present, state agents are shown to detect and uncover, some- was essential also because of the fundamental political ambiguity we felt times preempt, the actions of rogue individuals that threaten the social order, towards existing forensic practices. The modern history of forensics is of thus reasserting the power of a “benevolent state.”8 The state controls the tech- course the history of the techniques by which states police individuals. It nological means, and science stands as the embodiment of a rational order includes the physiognomic techniques of the nineteenth century and the assembled to confront and overpower irrational aberrations. The present forensic digital eavesdropping of yesterday. We were on the other hand committed to sensibility seeks to bypass human testimony, especially that of the victims of the possibilities of reversing the forensic gaze, to ways of turning forensics violence, precisely because the memory of violent events, often complicated by into a counter-hegemonic practice able to invert the relation between indi- trauma, is seen to be marked by the very irrationality, sometimes madness, of viduals and states, to challenge and resist state and corporate violence and the perpetrator, and thus, to a certain extent, to mirror it. the tyranny of their truth. Transformative politics must begin with material Forensics can however never really overcome the complexities of the sub- issues, just as the revolutionary vortex slowly gathered pace around the ject, the ambiguity of language, and the frailty of witness memory. Material maggots in the rotten meat on board the Potemkin. science is never conclusive, but subjected to probability calculations and mar- Our investigations took place mainly in zones outside the effective con- gins of error, and the material reality forensically presented is itself of course trol of states. These “frontier zones” are the lawless battlefields of our colo- filtered through language. Furthermore, as I shall later explain, while police nial present. They are zones outside established state jurisdiction and estab- forensics is a disciplinary project that affirms the power of states, the direc- lished frames of criminal justice, where sovereign jurisdiction is unclear tion of the forensic gaze could also be inverted, and used instead to detect (such as in the Mediterranean Sea, where migrants are left to die), disinte- and interrupt state violations. It is precisely because of the potential political grated (as in some parts of Somalia or Yemen, where militants headquarter agencies and the complexity of the emerging scientific-aesthetic-linguistic and drone assassinations take place), or suspended and under siege (for field of forensics that a new forensis must emerge to challenge the assumptions example in such places as the tribal areas of west Pakistan, Gaza or the West of received forensic practices. Bank). In these places, powerful states can both inflict violence and deny * they have done so. We have also studied cases of “environmental violence” 10 Forensis Introduction 11 along the mineral frontiers of the Amazon basin and the Atacama Desert the affective power of poetry, documentary photography and filmmaking and undertaken research in the remote highland frontiers of Guatemala, where in stirring public compassion and action. On the other hand, the emergence the state is now coming to terms with the systematic destruction of people of the human rights sensibility structured the way artists understood and and landscapes that took place there a few decades ago. Ordinary criminal described conflict world-wide, providing means to interrogate historical forensics can usually not engage with these zones and issues. In contrast to and political processes from the point of view of its individual victims. the situation within state borders, here established forums do not always exist. Registering this entangled development, the lobbies of human rights organiza- In fact new forums must often be gathered around the necessities of justice. tions are almost exclusively dedicated to art exhibitions depicting personal However, mixed or absent jurisdictions in frontier zones have not limited stories filtered through different documentary practices. However, with the dissemination of evidence. New visibilities have emerged with the several important exceptions, artists’ accounts and representations of indi- development and widespread accessibility of digital data derived from activist viduals in distress were external to and illustrative of the actual investigative imagery and their accelerated dissemination via mobile phone, cloud, and work of human rights researchers. This project seeks to mark a possible social networks. These technologies have expanded the capacity to bear departure from the terms of this collaboration, and employ aesthetic means witness, but they have also transformed the meaning of testimony, and as investigative tools or as modes of investigation for analyzing political to a certain extent eroded its sanctity.10 Today there are many photographers processes and their consequences. and spectators but only a few witnesses in the traditional sense. While the The prospect of political activism committed to technological and scien- number of images and available information in the public domain has been tific investigation might understandably raise objections against the pros- amplified, bringing new sights, sounds, and issues into the eyes and ears of an pect of a return to the “rule” or “tyranny” of experts and to the dangers of extended polity,11 these images also call for new practices of trawling through, becoming detached from direct experience and empathy. But in the field that looking at, and looking again, interpreting, verifying, decoding and amplify- Thomas Keenan, following Allan Sekula, has called “counter-forensics,”14 ing messages and broadcasting them further. the experts and scientists we have collaborated with did not fit the mold of Forensis should thus be understood as something akin to a “critical the authoritarian, objective and neutral scientist inherited from Victorian- forensic practice” that includes both the production of evidence and the que- era state-funded science.15 The majority worked rather in modest, fragile, rying of the practices of evidence-making. Indeed, acts of political and legal overstretched and underfunded organizations, or else carried out their activism must negotiate a complicated terrain between compromise, complic- research completely independently and voluntarily. Their work was mostly ity, resistance and evasion. As the interview with human rights lawyer driven by political commitments and was motivated by a sense of solidarity. Michael Sfard in this book demonstrates, confronting political injustice in Indeed, the significance of the neutrality of the expert in assessing the plau- the name of the existing laws of war (also known as International Humani- sibility of the expertise is waning. Having an axe to grind should sharpen tarian Law or IHL) needs to be cognizant of the ways by which these laws the quality of one’s data rather than blunt one’s argument. Forensis is a have also been increasingly used to regulate, legitimate, and conduct the very good model for connecting aesthetic practices, activism, and science because violence they seemingly oppose. But the emergence of “a forensic warfare” it is structured by the necessity of taking sides in an argument, of fighting with which states use the laws of war to inflict violence,12 providing selective for and defending claims. (It is when the investigative process is opaque to evidence while destroying and denying evidence of their own wrongdoing, has non-experts—such as with DNA analysis—that claims for neutrality and also made Western states increasingly vulnerable to legal action. Western mili- objectivity start occupying their traditional central roles.) taries and states now organize to defend against what they refer to as “lawfare,” In forensis, then, we found both an operative concept and a critical describing it as a core threat on a par with their worst enemies (those complete- practice, but on the understanding that “critical” also connotes the vital, the ly dismissive of the effectiveness of legal action should note how Israel went so crucial, and the decisive. We were not simply content with unveiling and far as to call international humanitarian and legal action against it a “third stra- analyzing instances of power camouflaged as benevolence, nor with under- tegic threat” alongside Hezbollah and nuclear Iran).13 Sfard spoke to us about taking a critical anthropology of science or the law. The kernel of our multi- his struggles to find ways to work critically and tactically with the law, of his disciplinary field was rather architecture, and in architecture we found a attempts to find modes of practice mindful of its limitations and limited mode of intervention. potentials, while simultaneously recognizing the necessity to find other forums Indeed, the intensification of architectural research was central to our in which legal claims could politically resonate. project. We employed architecture as a field of knowledge and as a mode of Artists have collaborated with human rights organizations since the interpretation, one concerned not only with buildings but rather with an birth of the human rights movement in the mid-1970s, and these two ever-changing set of relations between people and things, mediated by spaces groups have co-evolved ever since. Human rights groups made great use of and structures across multiple scales: from the human body to human-induced 12 Forensis Introduction 13 climate change, from the scale of a single home, through that of larger minute transformations, fluctuations, variations and differences within territories, to the scale of the earth as the ultimate home—and one that we force fields. gradually came to realize is becoming both a construction site and a ruin.16 Forensics aestheticizes territorial formations in different ways. The To progress this claim I must explain what we mean by “forensic architec- incessantly transforming fields of conflict are the result of relations between ture” and why it became a crucial term for our work. a wide multiplicity of agents and the environments in which they are located. I have previously referred to these zones as the political plastic (referring to Joseph Beuys’ definition of art as a social plastic), in order to emphasize the Forensic Architecture ways conflicting geopolitical forces continuously interact with the materiality of the surface of the earth as they slow into form, or accelerate in a blast! Considering the wide range of projects, scales, issues, and epistemic frames Architecture emerges as a documentary form, not because photographs that the project ended up traversing, it is important to mention that Forensic of it circulate in the public domain but rather because it performs variations Architecture had a modest start: it was inspired by the unassuming work of on the following three things: it registers the effect of force fields, it contains building surveyors—the careful and systemic analysis of the structural and or stores these forces in material deformations, infrastructural conditions of a building.17 and, with the help of other mediating technolo- Building surveyors understand a crucial thing missed by most archi- gies and the forum, it transmits this information tects: a building is not a static thing. Rather, its form is continuously under- further. going transformations and in these transformations it registers external But the aesthetic dimension of forensics is influences. The various material components of a building—steel, plaster, not simply a return to a pre-Kantian aesthetics concrete, or wood—move at different speeds in response to the constant in which the sensing object was prioritized over force of gravity, the influence of the climate, changing patterns of inhabita- the sensing subject—rather, it involves a combi- tion and use, and the unique force of impact. These diffused form-making nation of the two.18 Material aesthetics is merely forces continue the singular form-making practice of the architect. Surveyors the first layer of a multidimensional concept that see buildings as matter undergoing complex processes of formation—as Thomas Keenan and I called forensic aesthetics.19 matter in formation, that is, as information. It is indeed in the material Forensic aesthetics is not only the heightened deformations and structural failures that micro and macro forces, political sensitivity of matter or of the field, but relies and historical processes might reveal themselves. on these material findings being brought into Some of a building’s most crucial transformations occur well below the Fig. 1. Eyal Weizman, a forum. Forensic aesthetics comes to designate the techniques and technol- Political Plastic: The West threshold of unenhanced visual perception. It takes years for microscopic Bank, 2002. These are ogies by which things are interpreted, presented and mediated in the forum, air bubbles trapped within a fast-drying paint to make their way up or down graphic layers of a map that is, the modes and processes by which matter becomes a political agent. of Jewish settlements in the face of a structure; their expansion and contraction, the path taken the West Bank prepared and the rate of their crawl respond to year-on-year changes in pressure and jointly by Eyal Weizman * and B’Tselem. In blue temperature, to fluctuations in humidity and changes in the levels of pollution, are Jewish Settlements; Seen from the perspective of forensic architecture, investigating this material which are the result of, among other things, political decisions, or more in brown, Palestinian geology of contemporary conflict still requires a building surveyor, but a built fabric. The map was precisely indecisions, regarding the environment. The inefficiencies of presented as evidence building surveyor of a new kind: the survey can no longer be immediate and in a number of legal pro- the global climate forum for example are thus indexed in the slight buckling cesses in Israel and haptic; the trained surveyor’s eye and the notepads on which his/her observa- of the wall paint, right under the window sill, in our office’s kitchenette. in The Hague. The form of tions are recorded are replaced by remote-sensing technologies that augment the colored areas on the Although, as I will later show, never perfectly so. map registers changing the aesthetic sensibility of material formations; images of localized forms For a building surveyor, architecture is a sensor, in that it is aestheticized political forces. Source: of damage that have occurred are extended by mathematical algorithms to http://www.btselem.org/ to its environment. Its form of aesthetics is however primer for and primary download/settlements_ model the damage that might occur in the future. But something of the relation to human judgment. Aesthetics is originally understood as that which map_eng.pdf. between a structural issue, the surveyor and the forum still lingers. pertains to the senses, but in this context it designates not the human senses If the figure of the detective was the nineteenth century’s response to the but rather the sensorial capacity of matter itself. It is the way in which density, complexity and alienation of the modern metropolis, the building matter can detect, register, and respond not only to contact and impact, surveyor must be the indispensible figure for understanding the present but to influences in its environment and to remote presence. Matter can condition of urban life as that of urban warfare. This form of violence— be regarded as an aesthetic sensorium in as much as its mutations register eruptive in cases of armed conflict or latent in ceaseless architectural acts of 14 Forensis Introduction 15 securitization—comes to reconfigure both the metropolis (the Western When architectural surveyors study cracks or other city) and the megacity (where Western armies chase their enemies). It mani- aspects in the structural pathology of a building, they tend fests itself in the entangled acts of construction, fortification, destruction to interpret their findings in relation to a narrowly circum- and reconstruction. In a time when most people dying in armed conflicts scribed set of conditions. They trace material deformations die inside buildings, the city can no longer be considered merely the loca- back to force, but in this they have reached the limit of their tion of war, but rather should be understood as the apparatus with which epistemic frame. Forces are rarely linked back to their multi- warfare is conducted. When the dust of its destruction finally settles, the ple political causalities. Such was the case in the trials con- way it settled can become evidence.20 But a ruin is rarely a piece evidence cerning the responsibility for the collapse of the Rana Plaza in and by itself. Cities are complex systems and the targeting of buildings, factory in Savar near Dhaka. On April 23, 2013, a crack bridges, roads and other nexuses of infrastructure can exercise a relational Fig. 2. Forensic anthro- appeared in the floors and walls of the building used by garment industry pologist Fredy Peccerelli effect well beyond the site of impact. demonstrates the impact sweatshops. Municipal building inspectors ordered the closure of the factory. For forensic architecture, buildings are thus not just passive elements, on a skull of a bullet fired But a crack is merely the potential for something to occur. Whether it will from a gun. Still from receptive sensors on which events are registered. Nor are they just the Paulo Tavares and Eyal tear a building apart or just linger there for years is a matter of probability. scenes of a crime, the locations in which violence takes place. Rather, built Weizman, The Mineral Geology of Genocide The Rana Plaza factory owners, hard pressed to deliver cheap fashion prod- environments are composite assemblies of structures, spaces, infrastruc- (2012), 47 min. ucts to Western labels, assessed the risk of collapse and the potential deaths ture, services and technologies with the capacity to act and interact with of their workers in relation to the risk of losing a lucrative contract due to their surroundings and shape events around them. They structure and con- delays in production. They disregarded the warnings and forced the workers dition rather than simply frame human action, they actively—sometimes to return on the following day (the senior management was not based in violently—shape incidents and events. the building). The workers, without voice or choice, entered the building A structural crack is a good example of an element that is both a sensor at 8 am; at 9 am the crack expanded, cutting furiously through it. More and an agent. Although such cracks may be seen as indicators of a structural than a thousand people—mostly women earning less than $40 a month problem external to themselves, they should not be understood simply as to produce our clothes—died in the rubble. symptoms, but rather as material events that emerge as a result of evolving The legal process dealing with the collapse of the building—our research force contradictions around and within them. No crack can ever be repro- fellow Nabil Ahmed reported back from Bangladesh—involved building duced; each is a unique combination between micro material inconsistencies surveyors both as witnesses and among the accused. The trial had the and macro force fields. Cracks progress along paths of least resistance that authority to engage with the responsibility for the causes of the event only tear through the places where the cohesive forces of aggregate matter are at Figs. 3, 4. Stills from a in terms of the construction quality of the building, the thickness of rein- their weakest. Moving up through the deep surface of the earth, supersonic video from the Dhaka forcing bars in the concrete columns, the floors illegally added, and the loads police showing building cracks tear not only through rock, but also through the thickness of the surveyor’s markings of the industrial machinery that the building was never designed to hold. atmosphere as if it were a solid medium. Cracks are without scale; their paths over the crack (image on Left out of the analytical process were the larger forces and actors involved the left) in one of Rana connect the materiality of otherwise disparate elements, including tectonic Plaza’s walls, Savar, in the collapse: factory owners connected to the ruling party, the consumers, plates, bedrocks, structural foundations and domestic walls. They move Dhaka area, April 23, and the multinational corporations feeding an endless appetite for cheap 2013 (a day before the through rock where a denser mineral concentration has settled. A column, collapse). Source: BBC fashion, forcing prices down and productivity up through a tangle of sub- beam, or floor might crack where the cement hardened around the odd News, “Dhaka Building contracting chains, all of which had the combined effect of both enriching Collapse: Police footage cigarette butt thrown into the mix during the process of construction. shows cracks,” April the elite and distancing their actions from direct responsibility. 26, 2013. http://www. As non-matter, cracks move faster than the material formations they tear bbc.co.uk/news/world- An analysis that would expand outwards from the crack should not through. A famous Guatemalan forensic anthropologist, holding a skull in asia-22307589. only seek closure and reparation, but should articulate new claims for justice. his hand, explained to Paulo Tavares and I that when a gunshot hits a skull at Dhaka-based architect three times the speed of sound, cracks emerge around the entry hole. As the and political activist cracks start tearing round the circular circumference of the skull, the speed Sujaul Khan made this of their movement is the same as the speed of the bullet, but they accelerate connection when he because the internal pressure adds to the force of impact. These cracks move concluded his detailed so much faster than the bullet (which as a material thing is decelerating survey of the collapse under the influence of friction) that they beat it to the far side; thus the bullet by extending the meta- impacts an already cracked surface on the other side of the same skull.21 phor to politics, writing 16 Forensis Introduction 17 that “the entire industry is bursting at its seams with dissent,” and insisted Fig. 7. (right) Human larger processes, events and social relations, Rights Watch’s munitions that justice necessitates a combined approach dealing with both the material expert Marc Garlasco conjunctions of actors and practices, struc- conditions of the building and those of the workers.22 This recalls the figure presenting a photograph tures and technologies.25 Beyond its manifes- that he took in the after- of Leonard Horner—the nineteenth century Factory Inspector for Lancashire math of the 2008–2009 tation in commodity or sexual form, it is in (and an amateur geologist) who, by exposing poor working conditions in the Gaza attack (Cast Lead) forensics that the fetish can be most produc- at the Human Rights garment industries (how little has changed!), according to Karl Marx, “ren- Project, Bard College, in tively practiced today. Here, the fetish should April 2010. In the image a dered an undying service to the English working class […] that should never woman stands admirably not be the mystifying and obfuscating veil be forgotten.”23 steadfast in front of the that masks the true way in which objects are ruins of her house. This In another part of the world Israeli excavations undertaken in the name photo encapsulates the made in the world—a feature of capitalism of “biblical archaeology” beneath the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, problematic aspect of that Marx identified in commodity fetishism. the shift in emphasis next to the old city in occupied Jerusalem, displaced a level of earth between from victim testimony to On the contrary, under the microphysical building foundations and the limestone bedrock. The vibrations caused by forensic architecture. In lens of methodological fetishism, it is in the object that the fabric of complex narrating this image Gar- Fig. 8. (below) Richard the excavation work could no longer be absorbed by the layer of aggregate lasco shifts his attention Goldstone’s press confer- social relations, imprinted political forces, and logics of practice are folded.26 from figure to ground, ence in Gaza, June 4, 2009. earth. These vibrations shot to the surface uninterrupted. In their petition interrogating the rubble If fetishism is the attribution of an inherent power and a certain agency to This image is perhaps to the Israeli High Court in 2008—as Dana Behrman, a former student of the house behind the one of the best demon- inanimate objects, then we must embrace the term as we come to understand witness and masking strations of the principles at the Centre for Research Architecture, has written—Palestinian residents her. His findings were and dangers of forensic objects, buildings, cracks and their representations as historical agents. and their representatives seeking to stop work on the site presented photo- frequently quoted in the architecture. Goldstone, In some respects forensic architecture is similar to, and in others it Goldstone report. Photo: heading a UN commission graphs of fractures in roads, water and sewage systems, crawling up struc- Human Rights Project, of enquiry into the Israeli crucially departs from the modes of practice found in other forensic prac- tural foundations and domestic walls, disappearing and reappearing as they Bard College, 2010. attack of Cast Lead (2008– tices like forensic medicine, anthropology, or archaeology. This departure 2009) stands in front of a discover ever more lines of least resistance through the surface or depth of destroyed multi-storied is not due to the fact that the subject matter of the former’s investigation natural limestone bedrock, asphalt, concrete and plaster.24 Excavating for building. Goldstone was is qualitatively different—architecture could indeed describe the pathology worried that the credi- archaeological ruins below the surface seems to have turned buildings above bility of the witnesses in of the contemporary era; buildings, cities, infrastructure, and territories (as the surface into contemporary ruins. The cracks also moved across different Gaza would be politically questioned and turned the well as their ruination) could potentially occupy an analogous place to that epistemic/disciplinary frames: geology, archaeology, urbanism, and architec- attention of his report to of the human body in forensic medicine for example. Rather, it is because material things. Buildings ture. Echoes of the historical and political context that involves the ongoing here stood for the absence the architecture in forensic architecture poses a different kind of challenge to underground occupation of Palestine were uttered in court but never heard. of witnesses. Around the forensic in this pairing, and vice versa. They mutually undo some of their Goldstone are members of After a short suspension, the court rejected the petition of the residents, the government in Gaza; respective authorities and designate a field that is beyond the scope of what accepted the state’s claim that the cracks might have been the result of “poor before them stands a is otherwise bounded by the separate epistemic frames they bring together. bouquet of microphones and illegal construction” and authorized the continuation of the subterra- belonging to international From the perspective of forensics, architecture is an analytic and pro- nean colonization of Palestine. Figs. 5, 6. Cracks in the news networks. But since bative mode for enquiring into the present through its spatial materializa- road and on the walls in the ruined building cannot the Palestinian neighbor- speak for itself, Goldstone tion. Forensics turns space into evidence, but also into the medium in * hood (former village) of speaks on its behalf to an which different types of evidence come together and into relation with each Silwan, east Jerusalem. international forum. Photo Our task is to extend the scope of forensic architecture beyond the presenta- These images were sub- © Ali Ali/EPA/Corbis. other. Forensic architecture thus intensifies the investigative capacity of mitted to the Israeli court tion of structural analysis in the context of property and insurance disputes, in 2008. Source: www architecture and turns it into a mode of and turn it into an analytical frame and a multi-layered political practice. It.silwanic.net/?p=1552. public address, a way of articulating political should make use of claims, and forces architectural researchers what Arjun Apadurai, to face cross-examination in the most an- following Marx and tagonistic of forums. Benjamin, has called On the other hand, seen from the point “methodological fetish- of view of architecture, forensics is extracted ism”—the microphysi- from its purely juridical context and placed cal analysis in which the in the political context of the forum. part or detail becomes Producing and presenting new types of an entry-point from evidence, as some essays in this book will which to reconstruct argue, can challenge the very forums in 18 Forensis Introduction 19 which evidence is presented. Evidence can affect a change to the protocols is replaced by face-to-screen and screen-to-screen interrogation. The in forums, or expand their perceptual and conceptual frames. New forums legal process proceeds much like the work of broadcast studios, using may emerge when a new claim becomes evident. Here forensic architecture a comparable array of facilities to record, store, archive, and transmit the becomes a projective practice that designates modes of conceiving, assem- images and sounds on which it depends.29 bling and constructing forums for the future. In her project on the ICTY archive, Susan Schuppli examines the The stereoscopy of forensic architecture thus simultaneously looks back- procedures by which media-artefacts turn into evidence. As she follows wards and forwards. In order to interpret past events from the analysis of the movement of video tapes, satellite images, maps, and recording devices material spaces, it is necessary to assemble new forums able to respond to the through a juridical matrix that sorts, archives, catalogues and presents complex demands of the future. To put it another way, forensic architecture them, these objects become what she calls “material witnesses”: that is, they engages both in acts of claim-making and in the practice of forum-building. bear witness not only to the alleged criminal events but to the very sorting process they underwent in order to qualify as evidence. Sharing this preoc- cupation, the Model Court collective is concerned with the ways in which new audio-visual and telecommunication technologies, their material pres- ence, digital properties, interruptions and breakdowns, outline the contem- porary sphere of universal jurisdiction as that of spatial and linguistic dislo- cation. Their film and installation Resolution 978 HD (2013), reproduced in this book as an image essay, follows the genocide trial of François Bazaramba, Figs. 9–12. In the spring a Rwandan national, in a district court of Porvoo, Finland. Because the trial of 2009, following the Forums Israeli winter attack, the necessitated the remote interrogation of the accused via teleconference, the Gaza-based and Hamas- legal principle of habeas corpus—which usually demands the physical presence run Ministry of Public Forensic architecture’s practice of establishing forums around evidence Works and Housing start- of the accused—was re-interpreted as the threshold condition of various (rather than the more common procedure whereby evidence enters existing ed compiling an archive technologies—bandwidth, resolution, and automatic light detectors—that titled “A Verification of courts) has an important historical precedent. The ICTY (The International Building-Destruction would allow the remotely-assembled court to see a person blush or sweat. Resulting from Attacks Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia) was established by the UN in by the Israeli Occupa- 1993 soon after the beginning of the Bosnian war and the discovery of tion.” This “book of destruction” contained evidence of extreme violence there.27 Its establishment was seen as a way of thousands of entries, From Subject to Object intervening in the then still ongoing conflict.28 But it was arguably established each documenting a single building that was precisely in order not to intervene in the conflict. The decision of Western completely or partially Within the fields of human rights and international law a methodological states to set up the ICTY, along with their strategy of sending and support- destroyed, from cracked shift has recently lead to a certain blurring. An emerging forensic sensibility walls in houses that still ing humanitarian missions, can be seen as an intentional alternative to send- stand, to those complete- has increasingly blurred the previously distinct categories of evidence, ing their militaries into action. ly reduced to piles of rubble. Each photograph corresponding to the law’s reference to objects, and the witness, the source Francesco Sebregondi’s conversation with Cesare Romano in this book displayed a catalogue of human testimony. This forensic turn is articulated against a cultural number spray-painted demonstrates the way in which the ICTY played a central part in shaping an onto the walls or onto the background that is increasingly tuned to the testimony of victims. Referred informal network of institutions that also includes international, national, rubble itself. Sometimes, to by scholars as the “era of the witness,” recent decades have seen the the building had been so and provincial courts, human rights councils and parliamentary commis- badly pulverized that the foregrounding of the narratives of victims, so that they have exerted an sions. Although these tribunals are some of the most institutionalized sites numbers had to be held enormous cultural, aesthetic, and political influence.30 up in front of the camera for the presentation of architectural evidence, the physical architecture of at the moment the photo- One of the manifestations of this blurring of categories is found in the their settings can often be unassuming. Some of them inhabit improvised or graph was taken. Source: way attention to the linguistic contents of testimony (logos) is increasingly Palestinian National Au- rented offices, community and sports halls, which demonstrates the extent thority, Ministry of Public displaced by attention directed to the materiality of the voice (phōnē). This Works and Housing. to which their physical setting is secondary to their function as media envi- is especially apparent in the way human speech is currently interrogated ronments. The “agora-centrism” of these international tribunals means that in the context of asylum hearings. Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s work is they have emerged as media spaces in a way that traditional courts—still concerned with the way border agencies employ digital techniques of voice largely allergic to the presence of the media—are not yet allowed to be. The enhancement to conjure a simplified geography of origins out of people’s architecture and physical arrangement of tribunals, as Laura Kurgan ex- accents (most often in order to deny asylum and justify deportation). In his plains, responds to the media by which they operate. Face-to-face interaction chapter in this volume, he explains that, under these conditions the witness 20 Forensis Introduction 21 account becomes itself the object of investigation, rendering the voice narratives. In an earlier essay, Godofredo Pereira described how Hugo simultaneously “the means of testimony and the object of forensic analysis.” Cháves’ arrangement of the televized exhumation of the bones of Simón Such privileging of the bodily aspect of enunciation over the linguistic of Bolívar in 2010 became a hybrid between a national ceremony, a scientific course has strong colonial connotations, and threatens to drown out the investigation, and a geopolitical intervention. Intended to cement a bond message, sometimes fragile and faint, in the stories of the most vulnerable between Cháves and Bolívar, it was however publically presented as an people. In seeking the ultimate truth about the subject in the objectified attempt (ultimately unsuccessful) to determine whether Bolívar’s bones qualities of its body, these techniques resemble physiognomy and phre- contained traces of arsenic, a possibility that would have implicated the nology—prominent influences on criminology—which up to the middle Colombian oligarchy of the time, and by extension present-day Colombia, of the nineteenth century saw “the spirit in the bone.”31 Modern techniques Cháves’ bête noire, in the killing of “the liberator.”35 This was just one in- of policing, it seems, do not just resemble, but in fact inherit aspects of stance of a frenzy of recent exhumations in South America. A year later, in these outmoded and politically suspect practices. 2011, the body of Salvador Allende was also exhumed, this time following Increased attention to the body has recently been manifest in the mobi- the request of his family, but with no less political implications. The task of lization of medical records and other evidence of bodily harm in human the exhumation, which was more sober, was to ascertain whether his death rights and humanitarian testimonies. This has challenged more traditional had been caused by suicide, as officially stated on his death certificate, or human rights epistemologies. From its inception, human rights work was by Pinochet’s troops when they stormed the presidential palace at the time been concerned with the human subject, the individual, and developed of the coup. The pathologists that gathered around the remains explained its methodologies around the dissemination of victim testimonies. These the controversial presence of two bullet holes in the skull, a fact that testimonies provided human rights organizations not only with an epistemic seemed to support an assassination scenario, as being the result of Allende’s resource with which to reconstruct histories of violence, but also charged use of an automatic rifle—the AK47 presented to him by Fidel Castro. their advocacy with affective ethical and political force.32 Other recent exhumations include that of Nobel Prize-winning poet and However, the ultimate witnesses of atrocities, as Primo Levi insisted, are diplomat Pablo Neruda in 2012 for a similar reason to that of Allende, and not the survivors whose testimonies can be listened to, recorded, archived, Francisco Caamaño, the executed guerrilla leader and former president of and transmitted.33 Starting in the mid-1980s and with increasing promi- the Dominican Republic, whose remains were recently exhumed in order nence since, forensic archaeologists, anthropologists, and pathologists have to confirm their identity before reburial. A truth commission examining been upturning the surface of the earth. In Argentina, Spain, Guatemala, the abuses of Brazil’s long dictatorship has recently exhumed João Goulart, Poland, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Honduras, the former Brazilian president toppled in a 1964 coup supported by the Iraqi Kurdistan, and Cyprus their work has uncovered hidden historical United States, in order to determine whether he was poisoned in 1976 details of extreme acts of violence, and aided in the returning of human by agents of Operation Condor while in exile in Argentina.36 remains to victims’ families. The contribution made by exhumations in the The recent cycle of exhumations in South America, which began form of legal evidence has been referred to as “the testimony of the dead.”34 in the aftermath of the junta regimes there, might relate to the cultural These efforts made a crucial contribution to shifting the political episte- tradition of presenting and celebrating the dead. Though this connection mologies and aesthetic representations of conflicts, inaugurating nothing between tradition and forensic politics might be specific to Latin America, less than a new cultural sensibility whose implications are still evident in the similar practices are also prevalent on the other side of the Atlantic. In way political conflicts are represented in the news media, but also in litera- Spain exhumations are currently being undertaken in order to find and ture, film, the arts and popular culture. Today, when exhumations are among identify the remains of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca and others killed the most common techniques for dealing with post-conflict environments, during the Spanish Civil War. In Palestine the remains of Yasser Arafat we might easily forget that not too long ago the mass graves of the victims were recently exhumed in a search for a lead isotope that would indicate of political violence were only the sites of religious or national ceremonies. the presence of radioactive polonium-210 and implicate Israel (and its In many places where conflicts were still ongoing, they were neglected or nuclear reactor) in this death. Forensics, increasingly, it seems, becomes treated as rubbish dumps. a tool of political protest. The fact that the anti-colonial or the anti-imperial But it is not only the exhumation of the civilian victims of wars that has leaders of the past are being exhumed might indicate that the politics made a significant intervention in the politics played out on the surface; the they pursued are felt to be direly absent amongst the living. forensic re-examination of the bodies of former anti-imperial or anti-colo- Human remains provided the hinge on which our forensic sensibility nial leaders, whose deaths occurred in suspicious circumstances, has recent- turned. However, as the above cases of exhumations demonstrate, this ly been embraced as a means of challenging dominant historical and political sensibility did not place science above politics. Nor do such cases, as 22 Forensis Introduction 23 Thomas Keenan elaborates in his essay, undo the ambigui- the war, the process of exhuming the bodies was complemented by their ty and messiness that is central to the concept of evi- recomposition. The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) dence. Although, in the popular imagination, the cold sought to establish the links between the different gravesites by identifying gaze of science produces conclusive and non-contestable soil types and cataloguing the DNA of separate bone fragments, re-assembling proofs, findings in the natural sciences are all subject to the bodies from the territories in which they were scattered. When more than probability and margins of error. The qualifying state- seventy percent of the bone mass of a single person was collected, the bones ments with which science expresses its finds has always were formally considered a single individual worthy of reburial. But these left room for political manipulations and negations. The individual bodies were also ascribed a collective identity as Muslims by the Swiss forensic team that religious authorities undertaking the reburials. Thus in the intervening years, examined the remains of Arafat concluded that he was poi- the process of ethnic transformation has been completed, as victims who were soned by Polonium with “83% confidence.” This allowed shot and put into mass graves as (in their own understanding) secular Yugo- the spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry to charac- slavs, were disinterred with a religious identity. This ascribing of identity after terize the scientific results as “inconclusive, at best.”37 death was, according to the Grupa Spomenik, the product of a similar process The testimonies of survivors were never simply mat- of ethnic separation and mindset to that which led to the destruction of these ters of positive truth: it was often in silence, distortion, people in the first place. confusion, or outright error that the effects of trauma, Part of Grupa Spomenik’s and Forensic Architecture’s project, Living and hence the eventually accepted truth of certain events, was inscribed. Fig. 13. Labeling and Death Camps, included a collaboration with Caroline Sturdy-Colls, location of the collected Yet the turn to exhumations does not produce a scenario in which the specimens taken from a forensic archaeologist who has developed a technique of non-invasive solid object provides a stable and fixed alternative to human uncertainties Yasser Arafat’s body upon archaeology with which she can peer into the soil in search of human and his exhumation and ambiguities.38 On the contrary, the aesthetic, political, and ethical on November 26, 2012. architectural remains, without digging the ground or exhuming it. Her complications that emerge with this turn establish the dead body not as Source: “Swiss forensic report on Arafat’s death,” images of the soil show no clearly-defined objects, only variations in soil an alternative to testimonial practices, but rather their continuation. Al Jazeera, last updated density and compactness. The actual nature of the blurry objects seen in the November 6, 2013, http:// The next phase in our investigation into the development of a new www.aljazeera.com/ representations she produces is a matter of probability. Only when archae- forensis was not confined to the study of the shift from subject to object, investigations/killing- ology becomes physical and objects are taken out of the ground do they get arafat/swiss-forensic- but rather of the tension that new forensic practices articulated between report-arafat-death- separated from the soil into which they have disintegrated. Their borders figure and ground. The figure-ground gestalt—which in our case describes 201311671255163780.html. need to be reestablished, and a figure emerges. the relation between the individual (dead or alive) and environments International Humanitarian Law and human rights investigations pro- (natural or man-made)—bears on questions of detectability and liability duce figurations. They tend to extract an individual (victim or perpetrator, and implies also a shift in the political potential of forensics. alive or dead) from the messy physical or political ground in which they were embedded. Individual testimonies, recorded in voice or in bone, were indeed useful in personifying histories of violence and making them affective. But From Object to Field by concentrating on the victim and by seeking to evoke identification and compassion, such accounts tended to mask the political context. In their work, Grupa Spomenik (Monument Group) challenges both the Other developments in human rights research methodologies—such objectification and subjectification of human remains. An introduction to as epidemiological and demographic studies of conflict-related mortality— their ongoing platform, “Mathemes of Re-association,” is presented in this turned away from a focus on the single victim. While pathology deals with book by Shela Sheikh. In August 1995, the UN Security Council were the individual body, epidemiology is concerned with the statistical measure- shown satellite images of what appeared to be mass graves near Srebrenica; ment and spatial mapping of patterns of public health, disease, and mortality a month later, the Serbian forces that perpetrated the genocide exhumed at the level of populations. In a seminar organized by Forensic Architecture these graves and reburied hundreds of bodies in several secondary graves together with the humanitarian Rony Brauman and Médecins Sans Fron- in other areas under their control. Subsequently, fearing the discovery of the tières (MSF) France, we studied this bio-political transformation, focusing secondary sites as well, they exhumed the bodies once again, and reburied on the way in which emergent techniques of collecting, analyzing, and them in a number of tertiary graves. Because of the crude and hasty manner presenting conflict-related mortality data have been used as tools of political in which these exhumations were conducted, remains of some bodies ended advocacy, supporting calls for intervention or abstention in recent debates up scattered across up to four gravesites over a large geographical area. After around conflicts in Sudan, Darfur, Burma, the Democratic Republic of 24 Forensis Introduction 25 Congo, and Iraq among others. While epidemiology establishes yet another origins, influencing these ‘grounds’ in return. The field is not an isolated, dis- relation to the witness, here as a statistical figure, the more pronounced tinct, stand-alone object, nor is it the neutral background on or against which the shift towards medical science and quantitative analysis has become, the human action takes place. Rather, it is a thick fabric of lateral relations, associa- more contested the science of epidemiology has also turned out to be.39 tions, and chains of actions between material things, large environments, indi- Another factor in turning the attention of human rights analysis to the viduals, and collective action. It connects different physical scales and scales of earth’s surface was the increased availability to the public, starting in the action. It overflows any map that seeks to frame it because there are always early 2000s, of satellite imagery. The reason here was technical. People are more connections and relations to be made in excess of its frame. invisible in publically available satellite photographs, which are degraded, Field causalities challenge contemporary ways of understanding for reasons of privacy and security, to the resolution in which the human violence because they demand a shift in explanatory models and structures body is masked within the square of a single pixel. From the satellite’s orbit, of causation. From a perspective informed by an understanding of field cau- events can only be registered as material inscriptions across the surface of salities, the analysis of armed conflict can no longer conform to the model the earth.40 These transformations are most commonly presented in “before of criminal law that seeks to trace a direct line between the two limit figures and after” images, as Ines Weizman and I show in this volume. of victim and perpetrator, or between the two ends of a smoking gun. In the work of Forensic Oceanography (Lorenzo Pezzani and Charles Establishing field causalities requires the examination of force fields, causal Heller together with Situ Studio) presented in this volume, the ground— ecologies, that are non-linear, diffused, simultaneous and involve multiple which in this case was the surface of the Mediterranean Sea—is studied agencies and feedback loops. Whereas linear causality entails a focus on to establish the location of the figure. In April 2011 a boat carrying seventy- sequences of causal events, field causality involves the spatial arrangement two African migrants en route to Italy ran out of petrol on the high seas. of simultaneous sites, actions and causes. It is inherently relational and This was the time of NATO’s siege of Libya and the Mediterranean was thus a spatial concept. By treating space as the medium of relation between full of military vessels. The migrant boat drifted for fourteen days, with- separate elements of evidence brought together, field causalities expands out food or water, and, without anyone intervening to help them, despite the analytical scope of forensic architecture. the obligation under international maritime law to provide assistance to Field causality is a useful frame for describing forms of violence that those in distress. Everyone on board died, but for nine survivors. Move- are not ruptural, but rather slow and continuous, without clear beginnings ment on water leaves no trace. But the Forensic Oceanography team set or ends—those which might be considered to constitute an endless war to reconstruct the path of the boat and identify the location of military defined by the permanent clash of multiple forces. Adrian Lahoud’s vessels in its proximity by studying the sea as a digital sensorium. The essay—“Floating Bodies”—deals with such a form of violence as it studies Example location of the place where a phone call was made by the migrants (to an the entanglement of climate change, political conflict, and war crimes in Eritrean priest in the Vatican) established the starting point of the drift. Darfur. Drawing on Locard’s principle that “every contact leaves a trace,” Historical patterns of wind and water movements in the Mediterranean which is fundamental for modern forensics, Lahoud suggests that in established a probable drift path. By demonstrating the proximity of the certain contexts “the contact and the trace drift apart, carried away on boat along its course to various military and commercial ships that could ocean currents and diffused into the atmosphere.” In a loop of positive have intervened, this research has the potential to reorient the judicial feedback, the effects of human-induced climate change—such as the process, which is still ongoing. desertification in the Sahel—aggravate conflicts along it, while these armed conflicts in turn further aggravate the destruction of the environment. Paulo Tavares’ work also engages with the intersection of armed Field Causality conflict and environmental destruction, by looking at the way recent and contemporary conflicts across the forests of Central/South America echo In the gestalt of human rights work, the figure (individuals/testimonies/ the earlier patterns of colonial violence that resulted in the transformation exhumations) and the ground (collectives/territorial studies/epidemiology) of the entire habitat of indigenous peoples. New technologies for the detec- occupy opposite ends of the spectrum. We needed another operative concept tion, imaging, and modeling of eco-systems such as the Amazon Basin, in order to work across the figure/ground divide. Field causalities, relating reveal these forests to be archaeological resources in which the spatial to the dimension of field in the field/forum divide of forensic practices, dispersal of plant types registers patterns of past human inhabitation and allowed us to connect individuals, environments, and artifices. They are, as movement. Nature, as Tavares insists, is not natural, but historical and our curator Anselm Franke explains, articulated through multiple foldings of archaeological in its relation with people. It also possesses a certain agency. figures into grounds, beings into their milieus, forms emerging out of In Ecuador and Bolivia, legal rights are extended into the sphere of what 26 Forensis Introduction 27 Tavares calls “non-human rights,” which are the rights of The adequate forums for dealing with field causalities might not be nature itself as a political subject. found in the juridical but rather the political domain. To establish field cau- Forensic Architecture’s investigation of the attacks conducted salities for violence and injustice is to articulate the material basis for the by government forces against the Ixil Maya people in the West imperative to dismantle or fundamentally reconfigure the political field, Guatemalan highlands in the early 1980s sought to complement as opposed to the standard tendency of international justice to isolate a few expeditions undertaken for the purpose of exhuming the victims culpable individuals while leaving the social and economic hierarchies of of these wars with an account of the ways in which the natural and a society intact. built environment have been the subject of systematic violence.41 We joined the exhumation teams and attempted to find and map the locations Fig. 14. Trekking in the mountains around of villages whose houses—built of organic materials—have disintegrated into Pexla Grande in search Weak Sensors the cloud forest. The Ixil had a large degree of autonomy from state control, of traces of building foundations. Still but the military campaign sought to “close” this last frontier. The campaign’s from Paulo Tavares and Forensics is the product of a series of mediations and intermediaries: strategy included systemic forms of environmental violence that used the twin Eyal Weizman, The Min- eral Geology of Genocide sensors, modes of capture, algorithms to calculate them, experts to present processes of construction and destruction: the massacres of civilians were (2012), 47 min. them, and forums to debate and decide on how to act upon them. Each complemented by the destruction of their villages, fields and forests—the very of these mediators has its own grammar, and is, of course, politically condi- ground on which both the life of the Ixil depended and on which also their ways tioned in a different way. of life were structured; meanwhile, government plans for the construction of In the task of registering political forces, proximate or remote, material model villages, roads, military installations and large farms were intended to form could only ever be a “weak sensor,” suggestive rather than conclusive. complete the reconfiguration of the environment as a means of exercising state Politics does not materialize in built (or destroyed) space as linear transfor- control and bringing the Ixil within the fold of the state. mation in the same way that quicksilver, for example, translates tempera- Field causalities are hard to establish, particularly in court, and might end ture into volume. The forums are themselves never simply objective; each up being the “bastard’s” best line of defense, in deflecting direct responsibility is located within a complex political reality that operates according to a onto a multiplicity of different causes. The legal problems that emerge out of different set of protocols, and is prone to different forms of manipulations. the shift from direct, intentional and linear causal chains to complex, environ- Each ultimately draws different limits around what can be shown and said. mental causal fields are demonstrated in the work of Nabil Ahmed on arsenic Material forms can thus only reflect history in fragments and ruins, poisoning. What came to be known in the late nineteenth century as the and suggest uncertain, discontinuous, and lacunar interpretations. But “Styrian Defense” was an argument used by those accused of using arsenic for although we can never know the past as a conclusive, transparent fact murder, by which they explained the presence of the poison in dead bodies Truth is the centre of the argument here mechanically etched into materiality, we should avoid the temptation of by pointing to its widespread presence in the Victorian domestic environment. (how to achieve it). Need to end the an anti-universalist perspective which regards truth simply as inherently A similar problem in legally establishing responsibility for field causali- postmodern analyses present relative, contingent, multiple, or non-existent, and instead view truth as everywhere, central in the process of ties is exemplified in the work of the Modelling Kivalina group. Their essay reproducing the status-quo by a common project under continuous construction. in this volume starts with the failure of the legal case Native Village of Kivalina individualising crimes, failures, and States and corporations can mobilize large resources to construct contrradictions of the system. v. ExxonMobil. In 2008 residents of Kivalina—a barrier island situated off their claims. But the nature of struggles for justice is that they must the northwestern coast of Alaska—filed a lawsuit in the the District Court for run counter to dominant and dominating narratives. They most often Northern California against twenty-three of the largest oil and gas compa- encounter not so much the “well-constructed facts” but rather the “well- nies in the world, charging them with contributing to climate change through constructed lies” produced by the technocrats working for rich states the emission of greenhouse gases, and thus to the erosion of their shoreline and corporations.43 Political activists and other militants strive thus not which, they claimed, threatened the island with imminent destruction. The on the solid ground of state-sponsored science but rather on weak signals, court ruled that the petitioners had not established direct causal chains of often at the threshold of visibility, pushing against the flood of obfuscat- responsibility due to the fact that climate change is a distributed and com- ing messages, of dominant narratives, fabricated noise, and attempts at plex process, spanning the entire earth. Against the persistent defense of denial. It is precisely because of the inherently fuzzy nature of forensis a criminal trial, it is hard enough, Eric Baccard, the chief forensic scientist and the fragility of its truth claims that political mobilization is essential of the International Criminal Court, coldly informed us, to establish that and commitments are necessary. At the same time, without the ambiguity a hole in a skull measuring 5.56 mm is the result of a 5.56 mm bullet, let of material investigation, politics would simply become the implementing alone to establish complex and diffused field causalities.42 arm of a calculative automaton. 28 Forensis Introduction 29  The investigations conducted by members of the Forensic Architecture 1 See the entry forensis in the Lexicon of this volume. 17 Sam Kubba, Architectural Forensics (New York: McGraw- team across the battlefields of contemporary frontier wars were tuned to 2 On the political and aesthetic implications of animism, see Hill Professional, 2008). See Dale Paegelow, Forensic Anselm Franke, “Animism: Notes on an Exhibition,” e-flux Architecture: An Introduction (Patterson: Cromlech and mobilized around weak signals that were sometimes barely perceptible. Journal #36 (July 2011), http://www.e-flux.com/journal Architect, 2001), www.cromlech-architect.com. A faint and blurry line in a single frame of a video shot by a videogra- /animism-notes-on-an-exhibition/. 18 For Bruno Latour aesthetics designate the ability to pher/activist along the wall in Palestine demonstrated, against all efforts 3 See Thomas Keenan, “Getting the dead to tell me what hap- perceive and to be concerned, “to render oneself sensitive, pened: Justice, prosopopoeia, and forensic afterlives,” in this a capacity that precedes any distinction between the at state denial, that a gas cartridge was fired by an Israeli soldier, directly volume; and Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman, Mengele’s instruments of science, of art and of politics.” See “The aiming at and killing a peaceful demonstrator (see “Case: Bil’in”). Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics (Berlin: Sternberg Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the A few scattered pixels, a little lighter than those surrounding them, sug- Press, 2012), 28. Quintilian discusses prosopopoeia in Book Globe,” Latour’s fourth Gifford Lecture, Edinburgh, Feb- 9, Chapter 2 of his The Orator’s Education, trans. Donald A. ruary 25, 2013, http://