Weizman Eyal. Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability

New York: Zone Books, 2017. — 376 p. — ISBN-10: 1935408860; ISBN-13: 978-1935408864.A new form of investigative practice that uses architecture as an optical device to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction.In recent years, the group Forensic Architecture began using novel research methods to undertake a series of investigations into human rights abuses. Today, the group provides crucial evidence for international courts and works with a wide range of activist groups, NGOs, Amnesty International, and the UN. Forensic Architecture has not only shed new light on human rights violations and state crimes across the globe but has also created a new form of investigative practice that bears its name. The group uses architecture as an optical device to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction, as well as to cross-reference a variety of evidence sources, such as new media, remote sensing, material analysis, witness testimony, and crowd-sourcing. In Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, the group's founder, provides, for the first time, an in-depth introduction to the history, practice, assumptions, potentials, and double binds of this practice. The book includes an extensive array of images, maps, and detailed documentation that records the intricate work the group has performed. Traversing multiple scales and durations, the case studies in this volume include the analysis of the shrapnel fragments in a room struck by drones in Pakistan, the reconstruction of a contested shooting in the West Bank, the architectural recreation of a secret Syrian detention centre from the memory of its survivors, a blow-by-blow account of a day-long battle in Gaza, and an investigation of environmental violence and climate change in the Guatemalan highlands and elsewhere.Weizman's Forensic Architecture, stunning and shocking in its critical narrative, powerful images, and daring investigations, presents a new form of public truth, technologically, architecturally, and aesthetically produced. The practice calls for a transformative politics in which architecture as a field of knowledge and a mode of interpretation exposes and confronts ever-new forms of state violence and secrecy.At the Threshold of DetectabilityNegative Positivism
Toward a Forensic Architecture
Drone Vision
Visual Extraterritorialization
PATTERN OF DRONE STRIKES
Under the Veil of Resolution
The Architecture of MemoryWhat Is Forensic Architecture?Cracks: Lines of Least ResistanceConflict SurveyorsStaro Sajmiste: the Inverted HorizonForensis
CounterforensicsA Knock on the RoofEngaged ObjectivityWhite PhosphorousThe Forensic Turn
The Era of the WitnessSaydnaya: Inside a Syrian Torture PrisonForensic Aesthetics
Image SpaceBefore and After
Locating Air Strikes in Syria
Abu Rahma: from Video to Virtual Modeling
Patterns
Counterpatterns
Field CausalityGuatemala: Environmental ViolenceThe Landscape Against the State
The Truth in RuinsCounterforensics in PalestineThe forensic dilemma
Architecture Against ArchitectsPolitical Forms and Forces"Counter-Cartography"
Precedents
The Pyramids of Gaza
Ruins in Inverse
LawfareThe Nakba Day KillingIntersectionsHannibal in RafahRafah, Black Friday; August 1, 2014
The Timeline
The Prisoner's Dilemma
Hannibal Unleashed
Image Space
Air: Nephanalysis of Bomb Clouds
Subsoil: The Underground Manhunt
To Kill A Dead Man
Meanwhile...
Postscript: Trial As DenialGround Truths"A Tribe against a State"
The Aridity Line
The Conflict Shoreline
Meteorological Traces
Negev Settlements, Vegetation, and Precipitation
The Bedouin Nakba
The Politics of Drought
Plant Vigor as a Political Sensor
Al-'Araqib in 1998, 2002, 2008, and 2014
Colonialism and Climate Change
The Climate of the Naqab's History
The Testimony of the Weather
Orientalist Meteorology
The Earth Photograph
Military Archaeology
Life at the Threshold of DetectabilityPostscript: the Slow Violence of the "split Second"