Forensic Architecture

Forensic Architecture (FA) is a non-governmental organization (NGO) which ‘undertakes advanced research on behalf of international prosecutors, human rights organizations, as well as political and environmental justice groups'.Footnote ⁷ It was founded in 2010 at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College in London. The combination of forensic architecture as a research methodology and FA as a research agency situates it at the intersection between UK higher education, international state-funded cultural institutions and political organizations and movements within the third sector.Footnote ⁸

Alongside the founding member, Eyal Weizman, the team includes experts from various disciplines: architects, artists, designers, programmers, activists, lawyers, writers and scientists. Typically, FA investigators research a specific case and carefully select and categorize the data pertaining to this investigation. In this process, they search the Web for open-source photographs, videos and reams of metadata related to the events under investigation. Equally, metadata of phone calls and phone camera videos, meteorological data, eyewitness accounts and model reconstructions are all part of their toolbox for crime reconstruction. They also use computer programs and digital animation software that can, for example, model building shapes to reconstitute bombed-out ruins, identify debris patterns from drone strikes and document tragedies like the Grenfell Tower fire that killed seventy-two people in London in 2017.Footnote ⁹

It is a crucial element of FA's work that the investigating team then aestheticize data and use artistic practices (e.g. visualization, re-enactment and sound work) and contexts (such as galleries and theatres) to present legal evidence in high-profile human rights investigations. Data mapping as well as the architectural practice of drawing can introduce complex narratives, scales and multiple agents into each project. In doing so, they expose political, ecological and social violence and present the findings to the wider public as well as legislative, executive, judiciary and capitalist authorities.Footnote ¹⁰ In this way, FA claims, its researchers are able to make serious contributions to political decision-making and legal processes. However, national and global legal institutions such as the International Court of Justice are often limited in access, investigations and judgments take a long time, and sensitive evidence is not usually available to the public. For all of these reasons, it is necessary for FA to maintain creative alliances with cultural institutions, which allow the agency to present evidence through aesthetic public forums, in which discussion, dialogue and questions are an inherent part of the encounter with each other and the negotiation of political violence. They disseminate their findings through collaborations with institutions such as the ICA in London, the Manchester International Festival, the infamous international art exhibition documenta, the Berlin-based art centre Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and state-funded theatre bodies such as the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin and the Schauspiel Köln.Footnote ¹¹

FA therefore collaborates on artistic projects, stages exhibitions and offers talks and seminars at various academic, artistic and public institutions all over the world. In Germany alone, FA presented their different works in various cultural spaces: in 2017 they exhibited Resisting Images at the Biennale for contemporary photography in Heidelberg, Germany; in 2017–18 they presented Change the System at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam; and in 2018 the exhibition Affect Me ran at the KAI 10 in Düsseldorf. Between 2019 and 2020 alone, they exhibited at eleven different galleries and art museums throughout Germany, including, among others, The Destruction of Yazidi Heritage at the Schafhof. Current exhibition contributions include We Never Sleep at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt (2020–1) and Beyond States: The Boundaries of Statehood at the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen (2021). These titles make evident the counterhegemonic and truth-finding claims and objectives that FA presents to visitors and audiences.

What specific forms these works and their presentations can take will be shown later in the article through a description and subsequent critical discussion of FA's exhibition of the work 77sqm_9:26min at the ICA in London between April and May 2018 and their previous work for the Tribunal NSU-Komplex auflösen (2017).

Forensic research and Forensic Aesthetics

Through combining forensic and creative research and presentation, FA's work can be understood within the wider context of the forensic turn in the arts.Footnote ¹² The term ‘forensic’ ‘refers to the application of theoretical knowledge and technological means to investigate and establish facts in a court of law. It encompasses a set of highly standardized practices of collecting, preserving, analysing and presenting evidence, instrumental in the detection of crime and admissible in legal contexts'.Footnote ¹³ In the book Mengele's Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics, FA founder Eyal Weizman acknowledges the considerable impact that the turn towards forensics had on wider cultural and political landscapes.Footnote ¹⁴ Together with his co-author, literary scholar Thomas Keenan, he comprehensively examines the implications of a forensic turn for practical, but also conceptual, political and artistic engagements with mass political violence.

FA too explores forensics as a political and aesthetic tool by investigating human rights violations and developing creative ways of exhibiting their findings. So far, sound and visual artists, coders, lawyers, architects and theatre-makers have worked on a variety of such investigations: they analysed gunshot sounds for a murder investigation (The Killing of Nadeem Nawara and Mohammed Abu Daher, 2014);Footnote ¹⁵ they translated the acoustic memories of torture survivors into visuals of the respective site of torture (Torture in Saydnaya Prison, 2011–ongoing);Footnote ¹⁶ and they listened to voices on a wire-tapped phone recording and determined the identity of the person speaking (The Murder of Pavlov Fyssas, 2018).Footnote ¹⁷ Occupying the roles of both technical specialist and artist, FA investigators expand the traditional means, purposes and audiences of forensic work by using audiovisual installations in museums and galleries as well as presentations in theatre spaces and performances.

FA's investigative work is in alliance with social-justice causes, in the protection and advancement of human rights.Footnote ¹⁸ It targets systemic institutional discrimination with the ultimate goal of changing these shortcomings. To this end, it is important that the forensic and artistic methods used by FA researchers and artists qualify them to be taken seriously as expert witnesses before courts, changing, for example, the outcome of verdicts about deportation in asylum cases.Footnote ¹⁹ Thus their work can offer alternatives to the practice of international courts of justice where a few guilty individuals are isolated, while the sociopolitical and economic hierarchies responsible for institutional violence remain unquestioned.

Of course, forensics also has an affective dimension – for both the communities that are victimized by political and systemic violence and potentially the audiences learning about incidents of human suffering. Going through as well as witnessing transformative dynamics of memory and grief can elicit strong emotional responses. Forensic reconstructions of chains of events can potentially foster identification and empathy or hostility towards perpetrators and victims. Ultimately, forensic investigation processes can even cultivate history and memory-making in the aftermath of political violence and help conceptualize the politics and agency of the dead.

But, as Zuzanna Dziuban argues, forensics here functions not only ‘in relation to past but also to unfolding [and future] realities of violence'.Footnote ²⁰ This futurity of forensics, i.e. the potential to prevent future violence or at least reduce the likelihood of it, is supported by FA's alliance with creative forms of exhibition and platforms, and hence the public audiences made possible by them. Tracing and exposing causes of violence and injustice ideally enables their audiences to see the need for a fundamental reconfiguration of the material basis in a given political context.

It emerges that their political creative practice makes FA helpful, or indeed ideal, allies to activist projects that aim at subverting or talking back at the authorities through an emphasis on individual voices and stories that do not have an official platform or seek to increase their reach to powerful institutions. The tools that FA employs can lend factual credence to the felt knowledge and personal stories that marginalized people and communities are fighting to get heard. In the following, we focus on the context of FA's investigation into the murder of Halit Yozgat, which was presented both in a gallery and in a theatre space. We will first describe the details of the investigation and then analyse the different contexts in which the findings were presented. This structure serves to critically engage with FA's assumptions about the inherent counterhegemonic potential of these artistic spaces.

77sqm_9:26min

The NSU (Nationalist Socialist Underground) used to be a clandestine terrorist unit, which is accused of having committed a series of crimes between 1999 and 2010, including ten attempted murders of postmigrants, three bombings and fifteen bank robberies. At the time of the crimes, state authorities blamed the deaths and bombings on ethnic mafias or family quarrels and police dismissed the possibility of hate crimes.Footnote ²¹ The NSU was exposed when two of its members died in a fire and the third turned herself in, leading to one of the most-watched trials in post-war Germany. In the case of a murder in an Internet café in Kassel, a state informant, Andreas Temme, was present at that very café at the time of the murder. His case was cleared by the judicial authorities. However, his unlikely story left victims’ families and activists in Germany dissatisfied and sparked debates about his testimony and a potential cover-up of the murder.

With video documentation, computer simulation, sound analysis and virtual-reality technology, the FA team captured the bullet's trajectory and the movements of the witnesses. During the investigation, which was commissioned by the Society of the Friends of Halit, an FA team created a precise digital reconstruction of the events – using floor plans of the three-room space, stills taken from YouTube videos, witness testimony, thousands of pages of official investigation material and one minute and eighteen seconds of leaked police video of Temme retracing his steps during his testimony. All material that is used by FA is open-source – what they effectively do in their forensic process is to ‘look again', to go back to material and take a long and extensive look at material that is available to the public. They then cross-reference bits of data in a slow process of research. In this specific investigation, the NSU case received the full attention of six people working over six months focusing exclusively on the nine minutes and seventy-seven square metres in which the crime took place. 77sqm_9:26min was also the very title of their exhibit at documenta 2017, which was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2018.

As the virtual reconstruction of the crime scene was not enough, their investigation process also included the building of a life-sized Internet café room (Fig. 1). They applied specialized eye-tracking software to show what Temme was able to see as he moved through the space. An accurate digital reconstruction allowed the agency to test dozens of different scenarios: could a gunshot have been heard in the café's back room? Did Temme have an obstructed view of the front door, or of the shooter? How long would it have taken for the smell of gunpowder to dissipate after the two shots were fired? ‘We need to see if he was a witness – an eyewitness, an earwitness, or a smell witness', Weizman says. ‘Is there enough information, in other words, to show that Temme was lying?'Footnote ²² FA succeeded in showing that Temme could not possibly have failed to hear, smell and see the crime happening at the café. However, their findings were not admissible as legal evidence in the proceedings.

Fig. 1.

Aerial view of the digital model of the Yozgats’ Internet café, including the locations of individuals at the time Halit Yozgat was murdered. Courtesy Forensic Architecture, 2021.

On 11 July 2018, the court announced its verdict, which indicted NSU member Beate Zschäpe, among four others as accomplices in nine murders and several attacks. Both the victims’ relatives and the German crime justice journalist Annette Ramelsberger expressed disappointment in the verdict and proceedings. She criticized the ruling for not engaging at all with the complicity of the intelligence services, nor mentioning the joint plaintiffs, the victims and their hurt families.Footnote ²³ Nonetheless, she characterized this court proceeding in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung as ‘deep drilling into German society', a ‘look into the abyss', revealing the shortcomings and mistakes of the post-Wall era, the period since the German reunification. Ultimately, it lay open the neglect to take seriously the apparent racism and systematic underground forming of neo-fascist networks, which continue until today.Footnote ²⁴ In 2020, in light of the murder of politician Walter Lübcke in Kassel, public criticism rose against the German intelligence services and called for the public disclosure of all NSU documents produced about informants such as Temme – albeit unsuccessfully.

The description of FA's investigation into the murder of Halit Yozgat and the investigation's subsequent contested status prompt a problematizing of the systemic operation of knowledge production and admission in state institutions such as courts and parliaments. In particular, FA's counterhegemonic investigations on behalf of victimized and marginalized communities blur the boundaries between scientific research, activism and, as we will discuss shortly, art and culture contexts. Therefore their work offers a complex perspective on the power dynamics present in the wider institutional legitimization of what constitutes knowledge in the first place and what makes it powerful and/or ‘just’. This in turn provides the basis both for what counts as legitimate evidence to cast moral, political and legal judgements, and for which cultural practices societies deem legitimate to produce ‘the truth'.Footnote ²⁵ Acknowledging and valuing the embodied knowledge of the public and, in particular, marginalized communities, FA's work poses the question of whose knowledge is recognized by legitimizing authorities and institutions and who embodies and performs this knowledge accordingly: who counts as an expert and who is able to assume a position of power?Footnote ²⁶

Weizman has responded to these systemic institutional entanglements in his presentation at the tribunal at the theatre in 2018, and he stated that the grass-roots tribunal and the arts institutions are therefore even more important as a counterplatform. The forum as the third element of FA's counterforensics – after the field and the laboratory – becomes essential.

Given the importance of the dissemination of FA's research findings to a wider public and the substantial part that art institutions play in the politics and power structures of the dissemination process, we will take a closer look at two of these specific contexts – a gallery and a theatre space. What are the inherent power structures associated with these spaces and what forms of performance and status are expected and assumed from the performers, the exhibited works and their audiences?

Investigations in the gallery

Upon visiting the Counter Investigations exhibition on 27 April 2018 at the ICA in London, it became evident to us that FA begin their work when official state-sanctioned processes of crime investigation and prosecution fail. Their counterforensic strategies are an attempt to contest the advantage of states (which can be any state, since their remit is global) in the field, the laboratory environment and, crucially, the civic forum. This is where their work arguably gains civic legitimization and, ultimately, power. Their investigations and evidence reveal the disturbing shortcomings of legislative and executive institutional bodies. Through their specific focus on, and empathy for, the needs and desires of witnesses and audiences, FA's work has the potential to show that the status of stateless citizens, for example, is taken more seriously in the arts than in other institutional contexts. As we are interested in a closer examination of these claims, we will now reflect on the experience of our exhibition visit within the gallery context.

Entering the exhibition space at the ICA, we saw on the left-hand side a long, white wall with exhibition text: three large columns that meticulously described FA's methodology. We were presented with claims about what the art gallery can do differently as a public forum in contrast to international courtrooms: namely to reflect on the political and cultural context of their work. On the right-hand side, a few marble steps inviting visitors to sit or walk down opened into the first exhibited artwork we encountered: 77sqm_9:26min. We found ourselves on a black carpet with white 1:1-scale outlines of the Internet café's architectural floor plan. Three screens next to another, installed at eye level, showed a looped video. It presented both the 1:1-scale physical model and the digital simulation of the crime scene in the family-run Internet café, including the timelines of Halit Yozgat, the assumed perpetrator and other witnesses. Behind the screens we could see a huge, white mural (approximately ten metres by three metres), whose graphic and visualized data seemed overwhelming at first (Fig. 2). From a distance, we could see an elaborate maze of crisscrossing red and grey lines, which reminded us of a network plan. It required visitors to step closer and spend time to understand what was shown here. The graphics represented the different actors, timelines and stories interwoven in the NSU-Komplex. It started with Yozgat's murder in April 2006; continued with the subsequent migrant communities’ protest marches in Kassel and Dortmund, Kein 10. Opfer (No tenth victim) (Fig. 3); and closed with his father Ismael Yozgat's testimony before a parliamentary inquiry in Hesse in December 2017. While FA's exhibition video reinvestigated the testimony video and focused on the activities during the nine minutes and twenty-six seconds at the crime scene only, this mural captured the temporal, social and political complexity of the wider story at stake. The mural included the trial in Munich; national parliamentary inquiries; civil society, including commemoration ceremonies; protest marches; and anti-racist activism against police discrimination and the Tribunal NSU-Komplex auflösen. Cultural institutions such as documenta, and media reports with their discriminatory framing of the case's victims and relatives, were also part of it.

Fig. 2.

Forensic Architecture's investigation into Halit Yozgat's murder, exhibited at London's Institute for Contemporary Arts in 2018. Courtesy Forensic Architecture, 2021.

Fig. 3.

The Tribunal NSU-Komplex auflösen in 2017 went from the theatre space on to the streets to demonstrate under banner ‘No next victim!’ in reference to the communities’ 2006 protest Kein 10. Opfer. Photography: Dörthe Boxberg, 2017. Courtesy Tribunal NSU-Komplex auflösen.

The exhibition required us to take time and sit quietly with each investigation, considering timelines, places and visual and sonic reconstructions, as well as written statements. Aesthetically considered choices were made to assemble and exhibit the materials and we were at all times aware of being a visitor in a gallery. However, the time and effort spent to both intellectually and empathetically grasp each investigation also led us to imagine ourselves as being in the shoes of someone with the legal authority to make judgements on the respective crimes committed. The combination of the gallery visit experience and the process of imagining together with the factual evidence presented created a quality of politically implicated aesthetic experience that was new to us. Crucially, the exhibition prompted us to feel like gaining authorial capacity to cast judgements on various legal cases and human rights violations, much like a gallery visitor is prompted to cast judgements on the quality and merit of artworks.

This affective–aesthetic strategy bears political potential as it can mobilize political awareness and commitment on the part of visitors. However, there are also risks and pitfalls to consider that are produced through the logic of the gallery institution itself. The exhibition overall seemed to put on central display FA researchers’ labour of data visualization. However, FA researchers themselves were shown little, if at all. Most of the time, we only heard their voice-over, and only in one case did we see an investigator conducting a witness interview on-screen. Largely, as is often the case in art exhibitions, the works spoke for themselves and on their own to us. In contrast to the fieldwork and live presentation by Weizmann and Christina Varvia at the Tribunal NSU-Komplex auflösen and its commemoration march, the exhibition thus portrayed FA rather as a disembodied institution. The ethical negotiations of who was investigating whom and what was being proven and to whom became obfuscated. While the political motivation of FA researchers is clear, and while Weizmann has become a prominent figure speaking out in solidarity with oppressed people, the ethical negotiations within the painstaking investigations did not enter the exhibition space and remained behind closed doors. Some of these were revealed only when we as researchers of this article invested time in listening to off-the-record interviews and personal conversations with FA researchers, or when visitors of the exhibition met FA researchers in specific seminars and workshops offered during the exhibition's run. In hindsight, this disembodiment of FA in the exhibition space created discomfort about FA researchers’ lack of positionality vis-à-vis the trauma and affected communities within the investigation processes. There is a problematic connection between the exhibition's effect of presenting a disembodied objective gaze onto the data and what the exhibition prompted us as visitors to imagine: i.e. being in the shoes of someone with the legal authority to make judgements on the respective crimes committed. Therein, the exhibition misses the opportunity to equally prompt us to position ourselves politically and imagine this legal authority as an embodied person with a certain political positionality and power also.

Additionally, as the exhibition assembled exemplary investigations by FA researchers, the focus was not on one case of political violence in one specific cultural context alone. Instead, as visitors at the ICA in London, we could engage with political atrocities in Germany, Syria, the Naqab desert, Mexico, Pakistan, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the Mediterranean Sea. Each investigation was spatially presented at the ICA in a way that felt vast and left us space to immerse ourselves fully in its methodological, cultural and political complexities. Yet while the ICA space gave room enough to transition with time from one to the next investigation, the case of the NSU murder nonetheless sat next to other investigations. Thus, in this exhibition, 77sqm_9:26min became only one investigation case among equally important others, and significantly it gained the status of a closed case.

The FA website, however, shows that the issue is far from being closed, by listing the political inquiries, legal decisions and civic activism dating far beyond Ismael Yozgat's appearance in court. However, in the exhibition space, as well as in other exhibitions since, 77sqm_9:26min seemed more detached from the continuous sociopolitical and cultural work of the civic community, which commissioned the investigation in the first place. The Society of the Friends of Halit remained one among a plethora of data points, which only silently pointed to the ongoing embodied and emotional labour of anti-racist activists around the globe.

Investigations in the theatre

The Tribunal NSU-Komplex auflösen people's tribunal was neither a re-enactment nor a designated dramatic work but a symbolic and emotive gathering in a theatre over five days in May 2017.Footnote ²⁷ With the efforts of major state-funded theatre institutions and an organizational period of more than two years, this tribunal offered a platform for the relatives of victims of murders committed by extremist right-wing terror. It explored possibilities of how to collectively deal with the aftermath of the crimes and the complicity of various societal actors. Around six hundred participants contributed to and participated in the tribunal, including workshops, panels and exhibitions, but also theatre performances about structural racism and the violence it fuels. The tribunal was hosted by the Schauspiel Köln, who collaborated with the Maxim Gorki Theater and the HAU in Berlin, the Münchner Kammerspiele, the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, and the Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne.Footnote ²⁸ The project was funded both by private donations and public money.Footnote ²⁹

The organizing committee of the tribunal, the Society of Friends of Halit, commissioned FA to reinvestigate the case of Temme, the federal homeland security agent, who was indeed present at the crime scene, where Halit Yozgat was murdered in 2006. As Weizmann explained at the tribunal, FA were denied the opportunity to present their findings at the Munich court that had been in session for several months between 2013 and 2018 to make a legal judgement on the NSU murder because it was just ‘art' and was therefore not admissible as legal evidence.Footnote ³⁰

The title of the case, chosen by the organizers, ‘NSU-Komplex auflösen', is telling insofar as it points to the connection between neo-Nazi terror and long-term institutional and structural racism in Germany, i.e. it frames the case as part of more complex and compounded histories of racism, rather than a mere singular event. It appears that it is in this counterhegemonic position that the theatre as an institution with a long history of holding forums and ‘looking again' can assist these counternarratives and counterpublics.

The Tribunal NSU-Komplex auflösen was held by a specific community that preceded the event and represented itself in the theatre. This act of self-representation in the theatre could be read as an insistence on the enduring status and value of theatre in Germany that is regarded as an institution imbued with the civic power to hold tribunals. These tribunals might not have juridical power; however, in their longevity and aftermath, they can have a political impact – one that is qualitatively different from the documentary performances and narrative-based stage dramaturgies which have dealt with and sought to represent the NSU proceedings and history since.Footnote ³¹

However, in our interview with researcher–activist and educator Ayşe Güleç, a more complicated relationship between the tribunal and the theatre emerges.Footnote ³² In our discussion, she explains that the choice to use the space of the Schauspiel Köln was pragmatically motivated by its proximity to the Keupstraße and the generous offer by the Schauspiel's artistic director to do whatever they wanted with the space. In addition, the historical factory buildings that the Schauspiel Köln was using at the time formed a meaningful connection with the descendants of former Turkish guest workers who came to Germany in the 1960s. Güleç emphasized that they did not use the Schauspiel Köln as a theatrical space with a clear separation between auditorium and stage and that they actively worked against the architectural hierarchization of the theatre space. This decision derived from the activists’ conceptualization of the space as a community-supported space from which different members of the grieving community could speak without being exposed, focused on and thus isolated as single individuals on a public stage. Therefore the grieving testimonies were given from within the rows of participants – members of the community were surrounded by and supported by their family members and friends. This use of space was deliberately designed as counterconcept to the spatial configuration of the courtroom in Munich, in which members of the affected community were experiencing harmful isolation and encountered disbelief in their witness testimonies during the legal trial.

With this comparison to the courtroom, Güleç's description of the activists' occupation of the theatre space provokes a problematization of the theatrical logic of exhibition and representation in relation to testimonies of trauma and grief. The theatron, through its configuration as a viewing space, thus reveals an inherently violent potential that is at odds with the needs of a community requiring a shared space to grieve. Rather than voicing grief in singular performances onstage, the community in the tribunal was collectively working through a mourning process. According to Güleç, the dissolution of the stage/auditorium divide was instrumental to showing a network of connected voices calling for justice.

Consequently, this problematization of the theatre as a suitable space for a critical engagement with hegemonic practices of state institutions in silencing minoritized voices also complicates FA's allyship with state-funded art institutions and their exhibition practices. This allyship should ideally serve to decentre the institutions themselves, but at the same time it is never completely devoid of self-interest, as, indeed, institutions such as German municipal and state theatres are in need of institutional reform and reinvention. The analysis of the interview shows that demands for civic participation and representation by previously and/or still marginalized groups in the German public sphere require a reconceptualization, if not deconstruction, of hegemonic institutional frameworks. The assumption that cultural institutions such as the theatre or the gallery inherently offer themselves up as counterhegemonic platforms has to be tested in each case specifically. As the case of the tribunal has shown, the space needed an active reworking and conscious reconfiguration by the activists to function in the way that Weizman assumes cultural platforms can.