Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability

On the occasion of the launch of this new title by Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, Weizman will be joined around the table by John Palmesino to discuss the different ways in which architecture could become an investigative practice. 

Forensic Architecture provides crucial evidence for international courts and works with a wide range of activist groups, NGOs, Amnesty International, and the UN. Beyond shedding new light on human rights violations and state crimes across the globe, Forensic Architecture 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 this book, 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. 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.

Eyal Weizman is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is a Global Scholar at Princeton University and a member of the board of directors of the Center for Investigative  Journalism. His books include Mengele’s Skull (with Thomas Keenan), The Least of All Possible Evils, and Hollow Land. 
www.forensic-architecture.org

John Palmesino is the co-founder of Territorial Agency, an independent organisation that combines contemporary architecture and urbanism for integrated spatial transformation. Their projects include the Museum of Oil with Greenpeace, the Anthropocene Observatory, and North. He is Diploma Unit Master at the AA, where he also teaches on the MA History and Critical Thinking. He teaches at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths. He was Advising Researcher at Jan Van Eyck Academie Maastricht. He is a founding member of multiplicity, an international network of researchers. He has lead the research of ETH Zurich–Studio Basel.
www.territorialagency.com