Forensic Architecture: the human rights group up for a Turner prize

On January 18 last year, just before dawn, a heavily armed Israeli police convoy rolled into the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran, at the edge of the Negev desert. Home to hundreds of tribespeople and founded in 1956, it had been declared illegal by an Israeli court and the police were there to oversee its demolition. Thirty-seven such villages were earmarked for destruction and Umm al-Hiran was to be replaced by a Jewish settlement called simply “Hiran”, which would be built across its ruins.

The convoy, predictably, was met by protesters. By the time the sun rose, a police officer, 37-year-old Erez Levi, and a 50-year-old maths teacher, Yaqub Mousa Abu al-Qi’an, were dead. According to the police and government, the maths teacher had links to Islamic State and had been shot after accelerating and deliberately running over Levi with his car. He was left to bleed to death.

That might have remained the accepted version of events had it not been for the intervention of Forensic Architecture, a groundbreaking research group that operates out of Goldsmiths University in southeast London and is largely funded by the European Research Council. Founded in 2010 and now 20 strong, it aims to turn traditional architecture on its head by building backwards from rubble and devastation to form a coherent story of the violence that caused it. The group says that as war in the 21st century tends to take place in the houses and streets of cities, analysis of architecture offers a unique insight into the destruction and the abuses that came with it.

It cross-referenced photos, video, audio and the thermal imaging footage from a police helicopter — which showed the directional heat clouds of gunfire — to prove not only that Abu al-Qi’an was driving slowly, but that he had been shot before the policeman was run down.

By accurately modelling the terrain and then re-enacting events, it also showed that his Toyota picked up speed because he lost control on a steep slope — the autopsy revealed that he had been hit in the knee. It even proved that he complied with orders to get out of the vehicle afterwards, since the car had doors that locked automatically at speeds greater than 20mph and could only be opened from the inside. They identified that he was shot at close range — despite co-operating by leaving the vehicle — and then denied medical treatment for 30 minutes until he died.

Forensic Architecture, whose work has been shortlisted for this year’s Turner prize, has quite a pedigree when it comes to challenging the Israeli state, and the issue of Bedouin land rights connects two of its biggest projects. The first is the attempt to win some sort of justice for Abu al-Qi’an, and the second — called Ground Truth — hopes to prove that specific plots of land have been continuously inhabited for centuries and are not, as the Israelis claim, tabula rasa. British aerial photography from the post-First World War mandate era, which shows the presence of wells, has proved especially useful.

“There’s an inbuilt racism in the Israeli system, so it’s a challenge to get into the courts,” the chief researcher, Ariel Caine, an Israeli architect, says. “It’s fair to say we have an antagonistic relationship with the Israeli state. So we put the evidence out there and try to provoke a response.

“With Abu al-Qi’an, there’s a battle over the narrative, but most of the police claims have been proven false. No one’s being prosecuted and no politicians have resigned, but at the street level . . . questions are being asked that weren’t asked before.”

The group has had some big victories, notably in the case of the top-secret “Hannibal directive”. It took a year to reconstruct the events of one day — “Black Friday”, August 1, 2014, when 2,000 bombs, missiles and shells landed on Rafa, in the Gaza Strip — but the results were far-reaching.

By analysing the structure of the bomb clouds — the roiling plumes of smoke and debris and body parts, each as unique as a fingerprint — thousands of images were synchronised and cross-referenced with shadow analysis (using vertical structures as sundials) to build a timeline of events and demonstrate that the onslaught was of an almost unprecedented intensity. By calculating the positions of cameras and applying trigonometry, the enormous size of the bombs used — captured in frames as they fell — could also be determined.

In short, Forensic Architecture proved that the immense bombardment was designed not to kill terrorists out in the open, but rather a captured Israeli soldier, Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, whom Israel believed was being held in a bunker underground. This was the meaning of the Hannibal directive: overwhelming force was to be employed to prevent Israeli soldiers being taken hostage, even if it meant liquidating them. It was revoked in 2016.

“There were rumours about the directive from the 1990s onwards,” says Eyal Weizman, Forensic’s 48-year-old Israeli founder. “It turned out to be one of the most horrific commands ever given to a military: to kill one of their own.

“Victories such as getting the Hannibal directive rescinded are rare, and we don’t know what it will be replaced with, so it’s a double-edged sword. But it’s important that civil society finds a way to push back against well-resourced militaries in any way we can: even if it just raises the cost to the state of lying, it makes lying a bit more difficult. You can’t let states have a monopoly on the narrative — you need verification, and architecture is one way of verifying events.”

An interactive model that the team used to investigate the fire at Grenfell Tower (FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE)

Of course, its “counter-forensics” — so called because it investigates the investigators, and concentrates on states rather than non-state actors — have not been limited to Israel and Palestine, although Weizman, who was born in Haifa but trained as an architect in London, was inspired to set up the group by what he saw as the complicity of Israeli architects in facilitating segregation. There have been investigations into the use of chlorine gas in Syria and into the murder of students in Mexico by local police in collusion with criminals. It is producing a model of the Grenfell fire, a disaster that, Weizman says, has had perhaps the biggest impact on his team of film-makers, designers, programmers and architects. “You need to be a mensch to deal with trauma and you never get used to it, but with Grenfell, suddenly it was around the corner.”

The United States, inevitably, has merited much attention, particularly the presence of “contractors” and military personnel at a torture site in Cameroon and the widespread use of drone strikes by the CIA in Waziristan, an area of Pakistan. Forensic Architecture claims that there have been more than 4,000 civilian deaths in this secret war against the Taliban and that the US is deploying “architectural technology” — Hellfire missiles designed to cut through roofs before detonating inside houses. A full-scale reconstruction of one room, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2016, meticulously reconstructed where a missile had exploded, where shrapnel had hit the walls, and where it hadn’t — because there were two bodies in the way.

“What used to be struck were vehicles, so the Taliban retreated into the cities to protect themselves,” Weizman says. “Then the strikes shifted. Most people are now killed inside buildings and what is left is a very particular architectural signature.

“In Cameroon they claimed they had no knowledge of what was happening, but we saw images of special forces and contractors in physical proximity to a building where detainees were being tortured — really tortured — and left outside to die. I find it very hard to believe they wouldn’t have heard or seen what was going on.”

A particular skill seems to be determining, through the analysis of spaces, exactly what can and can’t be seen — something the German intelligence service found to its cost. Last year Forensic Architecture proved that an agent could not have failed to witness, as was claimed, the 2006 murder of a 21-year-old Turkish café owner in Kassel by neo-Nazis in the next room.

Yet even after the inept cover-up was exposed using a full-scale replica, members of the Christian Democrats, the ruling political party, dismissed Forensic as a group of “unserious artists”.

It is a charge to which the group is sensitive. Forensic Architecture may not sell its work, although it has accepted commissions from The New York Times and Amnesty International among others, but it does use exhibitions to get its point across. Yet it remains ambivalent about being co-opted by the art world, precisely because it is afraid that the serious work may be compromised. Weizman has expressed doubts over the Turner shortlisting — past nominations have, after all, included Tracey Emin’s unmade bed.

“When they can’t contest the truth, they contest your credentials, so I was worried about the Turner because it could give ammunition to those who want to discredit us,” Weizman says. “It could be seen as reducing what we do to entertainment. But when you work against the state, you don’t always have access to courts, so you need to establish an alternative, and the art world is one of those.”

Wouldn’t he like to win?

“We’re only interested in winning cases,” he says. “Success is changing conditions on the ground. The rest is collateral.”