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FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE: The Space of Law in War

Final Report Summary - FASLW (FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE: The Space of Law in War)

Forensic Architecture: The Space of Law in War (FASLW) established Forensic Architecture as an emergent field that refers to the presentation of architectural evidence in legal contexts. As contemporary conflicts increasingly take place within urban areas, homes and neighbourhoods become targets and a growing number of civilian casualties occur within cities and buildings. Forensic Architecture (FA), developed and employed a novel set of research techniques to analyze violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) and human rights (HR) as they bear upon the built environment. As such FA managed to provide unique, solid, and clear evidence about incidents that other methods of investigation could not engage with. FASLW successfully established the practice of FA and tested its methodologies in a variety of high profile legal and human rights cases. It worked closely with leading HR organizations, providing novel types of architectural evidence in the context of a number of high profile IHL and HR investigations. FASLW produced architectural evidence for numerous human rights investigations and presented its reports in a number of landmark cases within national and international courts and tribunals. (www.forensic-architecture.org).
The UN Special Rapporteur for Counter Terrorism and Human Rights commissioned FA to analyse the destruction of buildings targeted by drone strikes as well as patterns of destruction in towns and villages resulting from drone warfare in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Gaza (wherethedronesstrike.com). The study was presented at the UN
General Assembly in New York (2013) and the Human Rights Council in Geneva (2014). In this context FA used environmental-sensing technologies together with specialised ground research to help locate the remains of destroyed buildings and villages overgrown by thick
rainforest. FA provided digital architectural models and animations to support a petition brought by the Palestinian village of Battir against the security barrier (wall) in the Israeli High Court, helping to win the case in 2015. Using LIDAR scanners and ground-penetrating radar we undertook a complete forensic survey of the former WW2 concentration camp of Staro Sajmište in Belgrade (2013). Other research projects were undertaken on behalf of HR groups including Human Rights Watch, Centro para la Acción Legal en Derechos Humanos, B’tselem, and Migeurop (/case/left-die-boat). This research was being carried out in close
collaboration with Amnesty International and the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry. FA’s evidence files, taking the shape of models, drawings, maps, web-based interactive cartographies, films, and animations have also been exhibited in leading cultural and art
institutions, including the Portikus in Frankfurt (2012), Le Bal in Paris (2015), the Photographers’ Gallery in London (forthcoming, 2015), as well as a large exhibition (with an accompanying 760 page catalogue) entitled Forensis at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin (2014). Confirming the cultural value of our work and its place in the
history of evidence making, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London purchased some of our visual material for their permanent collection (2015). FA has inspired a robust discussion in the fields of law and architecture as well as in those of media and aesthetic theory. FA’s
impact was further consolidated by academic reviews, mainstream media reports (The Guardian, NYT, BBC, CNN, El País, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Der Spiegel, and the FAZ), a documentary film produced about our work (The Architecture of Violence /Al Jazeera), numerous academic reviews, and was presented in several keynote lectures delivered by the PI, including the prestigious Nelson Mandela Lecture at the Bob Hawks Prime
Ministerial Centre, UNISA, Australia delivered in 2012 to an audience of academics, parliamentarians, and high court judges.