«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 multidimensional 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. 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 contemporary 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 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 investigation 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»(p.9)
«This complicates the relation between the component parts that make
forensic speech. Objects are animated in the process of presentation, referred to as if they were human subjects; as a famous forensic anthropologist once put it, “bones make great witnesses,” before going on to pose questions to them in court. The interpreters, meanwhile, are no longer necessarily people or experts but also automated or semi-automated technologies of detection and imaging. Finally, forums are no longer confined to arena-like buildings, but become increasingly diffused across a wide spectrum of sites and media forms» (p.10)«We set our research agenda and chose each of the investigations according to our political interests and commitments, and in order to interrogate the ways in which new types of evidence can affect political and legal processes. Together with different partner organizations, we investigated the actions of states and corporations and offered our analyses to civil society organizations, NGOs, activist groups, and prosecutors, who have presented them in various legal and political forums. On the other hand our work emerged as a body […]
rather than seeing the tension between practice and critique as a problem that needs to be resolved by choosing one or the other, we found in this problematization a productive resource that intensified our research process. This tension was essential also because of the fundamental political ambiguity we felt towards existing forensic practices. The modern history of forensics is of course the history of the techniques by which states police individuals. It includes the physiognomic techniques of the nineteenth century and the digital eavesdropping of yesterday. We were on the other hand committed to the possibilities of reversing the forensic gaze, to ways of turning forensics into a counter-hegemonic practice able to invert the relation between individuals and states, to challenge and resist state and corporate violence and the tyranny of their truth. Transformative politics must begin with material issues, just as the revolutionary vortex slowly gathered pace around the maggots in the rotten meat on board the Potemkin» (p.11)«In forensis, then, we found both an operative concept and a critical
practice, but on the understanding that “critical” also connotes the vital, the crucial, and the decisive. We were not simply content with unveiling and analyzing instances of power camouflaged as benevolence, nor with under- taking a critical anthropology of science or the law. The kernel of our multi- disciplinary field was rather architecture, and in architecture we found a mode of intervention […] We employed architecture as a field of knowledge and as a mode of interpretation, one concerned not only with buildings but rather with an ever-changing set of relations between people and things, mediated by spaces and structures across multiple scales» (p.13)«[…] Forensic Architecture had a modest start: it was inspired by the unassuming work of building surveyors—the careful and systemic analysis of the structural and infrastructural conditions of a building. Building surveyors understand a crucial thing missed by most architects: a building is not a static thing. Rather, its form is continuously undergoing transformations and in these transformations it registers external influence
[…] For a building surveyor, architecture is a sensor, in that it is aestheticized to its environment. Its form of aesthetics is however primer for and primary to human judgment. Aesthetics is originally understood as that which pertains to the senses, but in this context it designates not the human senses but rather the sensorial capacity of matter itself. It is the way in which matter can detect, register, and respond not only to contact and impact, but to influences in its environment and to remote presence. Matter can be regarded as an aesthetic sensorium (p.14)
«But the aesthetic dimension of forensics is not simply a return to a pre-Kantian aesthetics in which the sensing object was prioritized over the sensing subject—rather, it involves a combination of the two […] Seen from the perspective of forensic architecture, investigating this material geology of contemporary conflict still requires a building surveyor, but a building surveyor of a new kind: the survey can no longer be immediate and haptic; the trained surveyor’s eye and the notepads on which his/her observations are recorded are replaced by remote-sensing technologies that augment the aesthetic sensibility of material formations; images of localized forms of damage that have occurred are extended by mathematical algorithms to model the damage that might occur in the future. But something of the relation between a structural issue, the surveyor and the forum still lingers.
If the figure of the detective was the nineteenth century’s response to the density, complexity and alienation of the modern metropolis, the building surveyor must be the indispensible figure for understanding the present condition of urban life as that of urban warfare» (p.15)
«For forensic architecture, buildings are thus not just passive elements,
receptive sensors on which events are registered. Nor are they just the scenes of a crime, the locations in which violence takes place. Rather, built environments are composite assemblies of structures, spaces, infrastructure, services and technologies with the capacity to act and interact with their surroundings and shape events around them. They structure and condition rather than simply frame human action, they actively—sometimes violently—shape incidents and events.A structural crack is a good example of an element that is both a sensor and an agent. Although such cracks may be seen as indicators of a structural problem external to themselves, they should not be understood simply as symptoms, but rather as material events that emerge as a result of evolving force contradictions around and within them. No crack can ever be reproduced; each is a unique combination between micro material inconsistencies and macro force fields. Cracks progress along paths of least resistance that tear through the places where the cohesive forces of aggregate matter are at their weakest. Moving up through the deep surface of the earth, supersonic cracks tear not only through rock, but also through the thickness of the atmosphere as if it were a solid medium. Cracks are without scale; their paths connect the materiality of otherwise disparate elements, including tectonic plates, bedrocks, structural foundations and domestic walls» (p.16)
«Our task is to extend the scope of forensic architecture beyond the presentation of structural analysis in the context of property and insurance disputes, and turn it into an analytical frame and a multi-layered political practice» (p.18)
«From the perspective of forensics, architecture is an analytic and probative mode for enquiring into the present through its spatial materialization. Forensics turns space into evidence, but also into the medium in which different types of evidence come together and into relation with each other. Forensic architecture thus intensifies the investigative capacity of architecture and turns it into a mode of public address, a way of articulating political claims, and forces architectural researchers to face cross-examination in the most antagonistic of forums» (p.19)
«[…] seen from the point of view of architecture, forensics is extracted from its purely juridical context and placed in the political context of the forum. Producing and presenting new types of evidence […] can challenge the very forums in which evidence is presented. Evidence can affect a change to the protocols in forums, or expand their perceptual and conceptual frames. New forums may emerge when a new claim becomes evident. Here forensic architecture becomes a projective practice that designates modes of conceiving, assembling and constructing forums for the future […] In order to interpret past events from the analysis of material spaces, it is necessary to assemble new forums able to respond to the complex demands of the future. To put it another way, forensic architecture engages both in acts of claim-making and in the practice of forum-building.
Forensic architecture’s practice [is one] of establishing forums around evidence (rather than the more common procedure whereby evidence enters existing courts)» (pp.19-20)
«Within the fields of human rights and international law a methodological shift has recently lead to a certain blurring. An emerging forensic sensibility has increasingly blurred the previously distinct categories of evidence, corresponding to the law’s reference to objects, and the witness, the source of human testimony. This forensic turn is articulated against a cultural background that is increasingly tuned to the testimony of victims. Referred to by scholars as the “era of the witness,” recent decades have seen the foregrounding of the narratives of victims, so that they have exerted an enormous cultural, aesthetic, and political influence. One of the manifestations of this blurring of categories is found in the
way attention to the linguistic contents of testimony (logos) is increasingly displaced by attention directed to the materiality of the voice (pho¯ne¯)» (p.21)«Increased attention to the body has recently been manifest in the mobilization of medical records and other evidence of bodily harm in human rights and humanitarian testimonies. This has challenged more traditional human rights epistemologies […] However, the ultimate witnesses of atrocities, as Primo Levi insisted, are not the survivors whose testimonies can be listened to, recorded, archived, and transmitted.
Starting in the mid-1980s and with increasing prominence since, forensic archaeologists, anthropologists, and pathologists have been upturning the surface of the earth.» (p.22)«The testimonies of survivors were never simply matters of positive truth: it was often in silence, distortion, confusion, or outright error that the effects of trauma, and hence the eventually accepted truth of certain events, was inscribed. Yet the turn to exhumations does not produce a scenario in which the solid object provides a stable and fixed alternative to human uncertainties and ambiguities. On the contrary, the aesthetic, political, and ethical complications that emerge with this turn establish the dead body not as an alternative to testimonial practices, but rather their continuation.
The next phase in our investigation into the development of a new
forensis was not confined to the study of the shift from subject to object, but rather of the tension that new forensic practices articulated between figure and ground. The figure-ground gestalt—which in our case describes the relation between the individual (dead or alive) and environments (natural or man-made)—bears on questions of detectability and liability and implies also a shift in the political potential of forensics.» (p.24)«In the gestalt of human rights work, the figure (individuals/testimonies/ exhumations) and the ground (collectives/territorial studies/epidemiology) occupy opposite ends of the spectrum. We needed another operative concept in order to work across the figure/ground divide. Field causalities, relating to the dimension of field in the field/forum divide of forensic practices, allowed us to connect individuals, environments, and artifice» (p.26)
«The field is not an isolated, distinct, stand-alone object, nor is it the neutral background on or against which human action takes place. Rather, it is a thick fabric of lateral relations, associations, and chains of actions between material things, large environments, individuals, and collective action. It connects different physical scales and scales of action. It overflows any map that seeks to frame it because there are always more connections and relations to be made in excess of its frame.
Field causalities challenge contemporary ways of understanding violence because they demand a shift in explanatory models and structures of causation […] Establishing field causalities requires the examination of force fields, causal ecologies, that are non-linear, diffused, simultaneous and involve multiple agencies and feedback loops. Whereas linear causality entails a focus on sequences of causal events, field causality involves the spatial arrangement of simultaneous sites, actions and causes. It is inherently relational and thus a spatial concept. By treating space as the medium of relation between separate elements of evidence brought together, field causalities expands the analytical scope of forensic architecture.
Field causality is a useful frame for describing forms of violence that
are not ruptural, but rather slow and continuous, without clear beginnings or ends» (p.27)«Field causalities are hard to establish, particularly in court, and might end up being the ‘bastard’s’ best line of defense, in deflecting direct responsibility onto a multiplicity of different causes» (p.28)
«The adequate forums for dealing with field causalities might not be
found in the juridical but rather the political domain. To establish field causalities for violence and injustice is to articulate the material basis for the imperative to dismantle or fundamentally reconfigure the political field, as opposed to the standard tendency of international justice to isolate a few culpable individuals while leaving the social and economic hierarchies of a society intact[…]
Forensics is the product of a series of mediations and intermediaries: sensors, modes of capture, algorithms to calculate them, experts to present them, and forums to debate and decide on how to act upon them. Each of these mediators has its own grammar, and is, of course, politically conditioned in a different way. In the task of registering political forces, proximate or remote, material form could only ever be a ‘weak sensor,’ suggestive rather than conclusive. Politics does not materialize in built (or destroyed) space as linear transformation in the same way that quicksilver, for example, translates temperature into volume. The forums are themselves never simply objective; each is located within a complex political reality that operates according to a different set of protocols, and is prone to different forms of manipulations. Each ultimately draws different limits around what can be shown and said.» (p.29)
–Weizman, E. (2014). Introduction: Forensis. In Forensic Architecture (Ed.), Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (pp. 9–32). Berlin: Sternberg Press.
