This proposal, Forensic Architecture: The Media Environments of Conflict (FAMEC), was envisaged to build upon an ERC starting grant entitled Forensic Architecture: The Space of Law in War (FASLW, 2011-15). FASLW successfully established the practice of FA and tested its methodologies in a variety of landmark legal and human rights cases in courtrooms and tribunals around the world, including at the UN General Assembly. From that fertile ground, FAMEC embarked upon pioneering new research trajectories, engaging with emerging conditions of contemporary conflict and state violence identified during FASLW. Since the early 2010s, scenes of contemporary urban conflict have become dense media environments, however, this exponential increase of primary sources does not necessarily add more clarity, rather it can increase confusion, misinformation, and propaganda, becoming material for a second conflict about veracity and interpretation. These major shifts in how information about conflict and rights violations is disseminated and understood, brought about by the emergence of social media tools and environmental media technologies, demanded a new medium, and a new methodological toolbox, to recompose fragmentary pieces of evidentiary media – images and video from warzones, detention sites, protests, evictions – and to counter misinformation, denialism, and ‘fake news’ about the events captured in that media.
FAMEC posited architecture – particularly the emergent academic field of ‘forensic architecture’ – as precisely that medium and mode of analysis, a tool through which to connect the eruptive violence of single incidents with the slow violence of social and political conditions, and to present information, evidence, findings, and arguments in a convincing and accessible manner, across multiple forums, in pursuit of accountability for human rights violations and war crimes. Such a practice, a contemporary response to contemporary conditions, is of fundamental social importance: for any accountability structures or civil society networks to respond appropriately to war crimes, human rights violations, or deaths in custody, they must be informed of those violations, and persuaded of the veracity of reporting about them, in the modalities and language of a new information era. FAMEC has developed techniques to collect and compile image data, then locate, compose, and cross-reference them within a digital 3D reconstruction of the architectural environment in which the incident unfolded.
By engaging with ongoing human rights and environmental concerns through more than 60 published investigations and over 200 exhibitions, FAMEC has developed and disseminated core methodologies for investigative visual and spatial analysis, including the use of digital models, ‘game engine’ software, and custom-built interactive mapping software, for the organisation, verification, presentation and analysis of image and video data, as well as theoretical contributions to contemporary human rights work, particularly the development of the concept of ‘open verification’. Alongside our published videos and exhibitions, we have provided expert forensic reports for casework, organised and contributed to symposia and workshops around the world, published monographs and articles. Major exhibitions have been accompanied by seminars and public programmes. FA’s website is an extensive resource of investigative materials, testifying to the development of the FAMEC project, and an archive of our exhibitions and publications. Beginning within the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, we have supported the development of MA courses in forensic architecture at Goldsmiths, and at institutions around the world, while many of our casework-led engagements with activist networks have been exercises in multi-directional skill-sharing, in which the techniques and theoretical positions of FA meet the situated knowledge and experience of communities on the frontline of human rights struggles.
