Forensic Architecture : qu'est-ce donc? by Boris Papeians

Forensic Architecture : qu’est-ce donc ? Une analyse par Boris Papeians

6938 ‘Artes visuais e estudos criticos’ MA1 - ESAP - 2015/16

INTRODUCTION

I - FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE

II - LE PROJET BASÉ À L’UNIVERSITÉ DE LONDRES - GOLDSMITH

III - LES THÊMES ABORDÉ DANS LES ENQUÊTES

ARCHITECTURE FORENSIC

BEFORE & AFTER

DRIFT

FORUMS

FIGURE-GROUND

OSTEOBIOGRAPHIES

PREDICTIVES FORENSICS

THRESHOLD OF DETECTABILITY

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

WEBOGRAPHIE

ANNEXES

INTRODUCTION

Quelle que ce soit l’époque, la culture, la religion ou le système politique, une partie de l’espèce humaine a toujours enfreint les règles et les lois. Que ce soit pour voler de la nourriture ou détrousser tout un pays, il est possible de trouver des preuves des mauvaises actions de tous, du plus petit mendiant au dirigeant le plus puissant. L’apparition de la démocratie - du pouvoir pour et par le peuple est venue modifier les hiérarchies jusqu’alors en place (et qui continueront d’apparaitre et disparaitre au fil des siècles). Cette démocratie passe par des discussions traitant de divers sujet relatif à la vie en communauté. Celles-ci se tenaient en général au niveau d’une ville, parfois plus.

Les Romains se réunissaient dans ce qu’ils appelaient un ‘forum’ et dont est tiré le terme anglais ‘forensic’1. Durant l’Antiquité, le forum était le lieu où le peuple se réunissait et débattait sur des questions relative à la politique, à l’économie ou encore à la législation. Il n’était alors pas rare de voir apparaitre des témoignages de personnes mais aussi d’objets, de villes, de pays ou de territoires. Ceux-ci ne pouvant s’exprimer d’eux-mêmes, il revenait à d’autres d’établir un discours sur base de preuves qui seraient fournies directement par les dits objets, etc.

Ce terme sera plus amplement défini dans le point I - FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE !3

Avec le temps, la succession d’empires, de royaumes, etc. mena petit à petit vers une ‘modernisation’ de la société. Cette modernisation passa aussi par celle du terme ‘forensic’ qui perdit petit à petit ses connotations politique et économique pour ne se voir référé qu’à des questions légales. Là où le terme désignait un lieu d’échange à divers niveau, il en arriva à être limité à la Court de Justice et à l’utilisation de la science et de la médecine en sont sein. Comme le disent bien les curateurs de l’exposition Forensis qui s’est tenue à Berlin en 2014 : “Aujourd’hui, la ‘forensic’ est centrale dans la manière dont les états contrôlent et gouvernent leurs sujets, et, à travers ses représentations populaires 2, est devenue une caractéristique déterminante de la culture contemporaine.” 3

Aujourd’hui, ou plutôt en 2011, un groupe de personne trouva bon de retourner aux origines étymologique du terme ‘forensis’4. C’est principalement de ce groupe dont nous allons parler dans le reste de ce travail. Pour ce faire nous allons dans un premier temps revenir plus en détail sur ce que le terme ‘Forensic Architecture’ signifie. Nous continuerons en décrivant le projet basé à l’Université de Londres -

Au travers de romans, films, séries télévisés ou encore bandes-dessinées.

HAUS DER KULTUREN DER WELT Exhibition Guide Forensis. Berlin, 2014. p.8

Terme romain d’où vient le terme anglais ‘forensics’ - voir point I - FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE 4

Goldsmith. Pour terminer, nous essaierons de voir ensemble quels sont les thèmes que ce groupe traite, en partie au travers d’affaires liées à ceuxci mais aussi au travers de certains moments dans l’Histoire permettant de mieux en cerner les origines.

I - FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE

Avant de développer plus sur le sujet, il est important de savoir avec plus de précision de quoi il est question. Pour cela, nous allons ici commencer par définir ce qu’est exactement la ‘Forensic Architecture’. Le terme ‘forensic’ vient du latin ‘forensis’ qui signifie : ‘les choses en lien avec le forum’5. À l’époque romaine, le forum était le lieu où se déroulait la vie communautaire. Cela incluait des marchés mais aussi des plaidoiries juridiques, des débats politiques ou des questions liées à l’économie. L’idée principale d’un tel endroit était la découverte de la vérité, par le biais de témoignages d’êtres humains ou d’objects. Les siècles passèrent et la modernisation du terme en changea la signification pour ne plus qu’être liée uniquement à la science et la médecine prenant place dans le système juridique. Aujourd’hui, le terme ‘forensics’ est défini comme l’ensemble des “tests

ou techniques

scientifiques utilisées dans la découverte d’un crime” 6.

A défaut d’une traduction adéquate7 en français, nous utiliserons ce terme en anglais quand il sera nécessaire dans le reste de cette analyse.

https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/forensis / 09.06.16

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/forensic : Forensics (noun) : Scientific tests or techniques used in connection with the detection of crime. 6

voir annexe !6

II - LE PROJET BASÉ À L’UNIVERSITÉ DE LONDRES - GOLDSMITH

L’idée est donc de retourner à la signification première du terme, à son potentiel original : celui d’un outil non pas uniquement légal mais aussi politique et économique, de trouver un moyen d’utiliser ce qui est à notre disposition afin de combattre les abus et les violations que nous infligent non seulement certaines personnes isolées mais aussi des groupes, tels que des grandes organisations ou des états. C’est suite à cela que le projet a été créé en 2011 par le Conseil européen de la recherche8. Il est basé au sein du Département des Cultures Visuelles de Goldsmiths - Université de Londres, le membre fondateur y donnant cours et y étant le directeur du “Centre for Research Architecture”. Nous pouvons retrouver dans l’équipe du projet des architectes mais aussi des artistes, des géographes, des scientifiques, des juristes et des chercheurs9 .

La manière de faire la guerre a fortement évoluée lors des dernières décennies. Ceci est un des facteurs qui a poussé à l’apparition de ce projet. Les combats se sont petit à petit déplacés pour prendre place dans les villes, prenant celles-ci et leurs populations en otage.

https://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/document/file/erc_2010_stg_results_all %20domains.pdf 8

http://www.forensic-architecture.org/team/ !7

L’apparition de nouvelles technologies - et les améliorations phénoménales effectuées sur celles-ci depuis - fait que ces champs de batailles modernes sont extrêmement bien documentés, via les réseaux sociaux et les médias classiques. Ce regroupement d’information et la banque de données gigantesque qui s’est créée fourmillent de preuves qui pourraient condamner de nombreuses exactions commises lors des combats.

L’idée du travail effectué par Forensic Architecture est d’utiliser ces informations afin d’analyser et dénoncer les violations des Droits de l’Homme ainsi que des Droits Internationaux Humanitaires. Ils font cela au travers de modèles 3D navigables de l’environnement ciblé, de vidéos et de cartographies interactives à de multiples échelles. Ces méthodes, différentes de celles communément utilisées, permettent une approche nouvelle et présentent les informations de façon claire, concise et accessible, chose importante dans la recherche des responsabilités. Elles permettent d’apporter une vision nouvelle, voir même une vision unique dans le sens où d’autres méthodes plus classiques ne pourraient guère parvenir à quoi que ce soit.

Comme dit précédemment, l’évolution et l’apparition de nouvelles technologies ainsi que la facilité d’accès à celles-ci a permis la création, via internet, d’un banque de donnée conséquente. Cela à

donc complexifié la manière dont se déroulent les combats tout en produisant un nouveau moyen de surveiller et enregistrer ce qui se passe lors des conflits sans devoir forcément y être physiquement présent. Grâce à cette quantité d’information accessible en temps réel, il est désormais possible de développer des affaires judiciaires sur ces bases là et non pas uniquement sur des témoignages longtemps après les faits.

Un problème pourtant fait surface : l’utilisation d’image de manière erronée. Si il est possible de faire dire une chose à une image, il est possible d’en faire dire d’autres. La manière dont les informations récoltées sont utilisées soulève de nombreuses critiques et remises en question quant à leur véracité et l’interprétation faite dans les médias, sur les réseaux sociaux et même dans les courts de Justice.10 La libération de l’utilisation des médias dans les forums internationaux 11 tels que la Chambre de Commerce Internationale et d’autres transforme la manière de traiter l’information qui est donnée. Nous passons d’une relation de face-à-face à une relation d’écran-à-écran, déshumanisant le processus.

C’est pour de telles raisons qu’il est important que se créent des organismes de défense des Droits de l’Homme qui militent pour une

Voir document en annexe : Burden of proof : The construction of visual evidence

Une des premières utilisations contemporaines de ces médias fût durant le Procès de Nuremberg après la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. Voir document en annexe. 11

nouvelle approche quant à la manière dont nous enquêtons les affaires à propos des violations de ces mêmes Droits. Depuis sa création, les méthodes de le projet Forensic Architecture ont été utilisées de manières effectives dans de nombreuses affaires liées à des questions territoriales et de Droits de l’Homme, en collaboration ou pour des communautés menacées, des ONG’s, des procureurs et l’ONU.12 Non seulement le travail effectué par ceux-ci a permis de résoudre de nombreuses affaires, ou du moins a apporté une lumière nouvelle sur celles-ci, il a aussi permit de créer un “débat robuste à propos des Droits de l’Homme, de l’architecture et des cercles légaux”13.

La manière dont est présentée l’information (documents visuels, interactivité, etc.) permet de facilité la lecture et améliore l’attractivité des sujets, souvent compliqués. Cette nouvelle utilisation des médias et le graphisme apparent des résultats a conduit à de nombreuses utilisations et réutilisations de ceux-ci dans le milieu artistique.

Plusieurs expositions et galeries présentent aujourd’hui une partie du travail effectué par Forensic Architecture14. Nous pouvons aussi

Pour de plus amples informations sur celles-ci, aller voir http://www.forensicarchitecture.org/cases/ 12

http://www.forensic-architecture.org/cases/

voir annexes ainsi que http://www.forensic-architecture.org/exhibitions/ pour plus d’informations 14

!10

retrouver celui-ci dans d’autres endroits tels que dans la presse15, lors de conférences et dans plusieurs critiques académiques 16.

http://www.forensic-architecture.org/news/

http://www.forensic-architecture.org/seminars/ !11

III - LES THÊMES ABORDÉ DANS LES ENQUÊTES

Le travail de Forensic Architecture se divise en 8 grands thèmes. Ceux-ci se penchent sur diverses problématiques qu’il est possible de rencontrer dans le monde aujourd’hui. Ces thèmes ne sont pas limités à eux-mêmes et sont souvent liés au travers de différentes affaires.

ARCHITECTURE FORENSIC L’architecture ‘forensic’ peut se définir comme “un processus analytique qui inclus l’examen des enveloppes de bâtiment (murs, fenêtres, murs rideaux, toitures, etc.), des systèmes d'étanchéité, de la résistance au feu des parois ou des plafonds, des matériaux de construction, des éléments structurels, et de nombreux autres aspects définissant un bâtiment. Elle est pratiquée par des architectes agréés au sein d’une juridiction.” 17

Contrairement à l’idée commune d’une architecture statique et inerte, les analystes traitant de ce sujet partent du principe que l’architecture, et les constructions de manière générale, enregistrent durant leur vie une quantité d’information phénoménale. D’un point de vue purement constructif, les différents matériaux qui composent une construction (béton, acier, plâtre, brique etc.) bougent de manière

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_Architecture !12

constante. Ceux-ci réagissent de manière différentes aux divers influences extérieures tel.le.s que la météo, la gravité, l’usage, ainsi que le souffle d’une explosion. Il est possible de décrypter les informations enregistrées dans ces constructions et d’en tirer des conclusions. Il est donc possible d’utiliser ces bâtiments comme une nouvelle forme de média, au même titre qu’une vidéo, une photo ou un enregistrement audio, et ce dans le cadre d’affaires juridiques en face d’un forum ou, éventuellement, devant une court et un jury.

Au printemps 2009, après un long hiver parcouru d’attaques israéliennes, le Ministère des Travaux Publics et du Logement palestinien créa une archive appelée “Une Vérification de la Destruction des Bâtiments Résultant des Attaques par l’Occupation Israélienne” 18. Ce ‘livre de la destruction’ contient des milliers d’entrées, chacune documentant un unique bâtiment qui a été totalement ou partiellement détruit, de la fissure dans un mur tenant encore debout aux constructions réduis à un tas de débris. Chaque photo présente un numéro marqué à la peinture sur un mur ou un débris. Parfois, la destruction est si extensive que ce numéro est écrit sur un morceau de papier tenu à bout de bras devant l’appareil photo. Ce numéro est en fait un code composé de lettres et de chiffres A Verification of Building-Destruction Resulting from Attacks by the Israeli Occupation - 2009 18

!13

qui permet d’identifier l’endroit exact où se trouvait la construction auparavant. La classification est basée sur un système de grille qui couvre l’ensemble de la Bande de Gaza. Chaque construction ou zone de construction probable a donc été désigné.e comme site de potentielle destruction. L’esthétique est généralement vue comme quelque chose pour et par l’humain, quelque chose de lié aux sens. Ici ce ne sont pas les sens humains dont nous parlons mais de la “capacité sensorielle de la matière elle-même”19. La dimension esthétique est ici composée de deux niveaux. Le premier s’appuie sur la découverte de matériaux et leur exposition devant un forum. Le deuxième regroupe les techniques et technologies qui permettent leur étude, leur interprétation et, finalement, la manière dont ils seront exposés devant le forum.

“Un fissure structurelle est un élément qui est à la fois un senseur et un agent. Les fissures se développe en suivant le chemin qui offre le moins de résistance; elles révèlent, exploitent, et déchirent les parties où les forces de cohésions sont à leur plus faible.”20 Il existe de nombreuses occurrences de bâtiments qui s'effondre suite à une construction mal

http://www.forensic-architecture.org/theme/architectural-forensics/

ibid. !14

effectuée, une mauvaise planification,

un mauvais entretien ou

simplement parfois par erreur - ou même bêtise - humaine. Le 23 Avril 2013, une fissure est apparue dans les planchers et les murs de l'usine Rana Plaza à Savar près de Dacca, un bâtiment rempli de chaines de production pour l'industrie du vêtement. En réponse, les inspecteurs municipaux du bâtiment ont ordonné la fermeture de l'usine. Mais une fissure est simplement un avertissement, une mise en garde qui nous dit que quelque chose peut éventuellement produire. Que celle-ci déchire le bâtiment en morceaux ou bien ne fasse rien pendant des années est une question de probabilité. Dans ce cas-ci la fissure s'élargie le lendemain matin, coupant furieusement à travers le bâtiment et tuant plus d'un millier de travailleurs qui avaient été forcés de retourner au travail. Le processus juridique qui a suivi impliqua des géomètres tant en qualité de témoins et que d'accusés. Le procès a ici eu pour but de déterminer les causes de l'événement - et donc de savoir où se situait la responsabilité - mais seulement en terme de qualité de la construction. D'autres forces et acteurs - plus important.e.s - furent laissées en dehors du processus d'analyse. Par forces et acteurs, il faut comprendre les propriétaires de l'usine liés au parti au pouvoir ainsi que les consommateurs et les entreprises multinationales alimentant continuellement un appétit sans fin pour les vêtements à bas prix.21 http://www.lepoint.fr/monde/bangladesh-plus-de-1-000-morts-dans-l-effondrementd-un-immeuble-10-05-2013-1665191_24.php 21

!15

Malheureusement, ces évènements arrivent plus fréquemment qu’ils ne le devraient. Une rapide tour sur le logiciel de recherche de votre choix permet de se rendre compte de l’impact que ceux-ci ont sur les communautés vivant et travaillant dans les alentours, ainsi qu’autour du monde.

BEFORE & AFTER Bien qu’intiment liée à notre vie de tout les jours ainsi qu’au processus légal, la photographie est elle même un processus complexe. Suivant la technique, les matériaux ou les conditions d’utilisation, le résultat sera grandement différent. Tout ne peux pas être photographié de la même manière et le résultat ne sera pas éternel. L’idée de la photographie ‘avant’ et ‘après’ est un des fondement de la vision temporelle de toute action légale. Elle permet de montrer un événement manquant en montrant ce qui le précédait et ce qui le suit. On peut retrouver de nombreuses instances, datant aussi loin que les premiers balbutiements de la photographie22, où un tel procédé a été utilisé. Généralement cela est du à des limitations techniques qu’à une volonté autre, que ce soit le long temps d’exposition qui empêchait de capturer les personnes ou les évènements rapides ou bien le temps d’orbite d’un satellite.

voir annexe !16

De nos jours, l’imagerie satellite 23 est une des manières les plus répandues d’obtenir des images ‘avant’ et ‘après’. Ceux-ci étant constamment en mouvement, il n’est pas rare que le décalage temporel entre deux images soit suffisant pour rater des événements importants. De plus, la résolution des images disponibles publiquement est limitées à 50 cm par pixel. Un pixel représente donc un carré de 50x50 cm, la dimension d’une personne vue du dessus. Bien que les grands groupes de personnes peuvent être parfois discernées, cette limitation de la résolution signifie que 150 ans après l’apparition de la photographie, le même problème persiste : les personnes et les événements rapides ne peuvent être capturés de manière efficaces.24

Avec la démocratisation des moyens informatiques et leur facilité d’exploitation, il est de plus en plus fréquent de voir des images satellites sous forme de GIF’s25. Ce format ressemblant à la vidéo permet une vision plus claire, plus dynamique de l’évolution présentée. Plusieurs années peuvent défilée en quelques secondes pour un impact plus fort. 26

voir annexe

Pour plus d’exemples visiter : http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ WorldOfChange/ 24

!25 Le Graphics Interchange Format (littéralement « format d'échange d'images »), plus connu sous l'acronyme GIF, est un format d'image numérique couramment utilisé sur le web. - Wikipedia Pour plus d’exemples visiter : http://www.topito.com/top-images-satellitesenvironnement 26

!17

DRIFT Contrairement à la géographie qui, étymologiquement, exprime la possibilité d’étudier et de relater les évènements qui se sont déroulés depuis aussi loin que l’on peut les discerner, il est plus difficile de dire la même chose pour les territoires maritimes. Les grandes masses d’eaux qui composent notre planète ont toujours été une zone en dehors des regards et des lois où peu de traces subsistent des méfaits commis .

La gestion des migrations maritimes est devenue un des fers de lance de la politique contemporaine. Les états traquent les migrations grâce à des technologies toujours plus pointues et les interceptent en mer grâce à des patrouilles, mais ce n’est pas tout. Le non déploiement de secours qui mène à la mort de nombreux migrants et réfugiés - une forme de meurtre passif - est encore d’actualité et fut longtemps difficilement prouvable. À cause de cela, il est souvent impossible de savoir précisément - voir tout court - le nombre de morts en haute mer.

L’augmentation et l’amélioration des technologies existante permettant de traquer les moindres faits et gestes en mer rend le principe de ‘liberté en haute mer’ de plus en plus difficile à garder réel. Ironiquement et paradoxalement, plus il existe de moyen de surveillance, plus les états deviennent vulnérables. L’utilisation de ces informations permet à de nombreuses organisations activistes de

!18

responsabiliser les états quant aux morts qui auraient pu être évitées. En effet, si les états peuvent voir des navires en détresse, ils sont obligés d’intervenir, ce qui n’est pas toujours le cas.

"En conséquence, la mer est devenue un laboratoire non seulement pour les nouvelles techniques de contrôle et de surveillance par l’état mais aussi pour de nouvelles pratiques de la citoyenneté transnationale et des Droits de l'Homme

27”.

FORUMS Les ‘forensics’ existent afin de relier deux zones d’opération : le terrain et le forum. Le premier est le lieu où l’enquête se déroule tandis que le deuxième est celui où les résultats obtenus sont présentés, débattus et/ou contestés.

Le forum est un appareil complexe composé de plusieurs éléments. Ceux-ci, au nombre de trois, sont : un sujet ou site contesté, un interprète dont le rôle est de “traduire” les éléments, et une assemblée constituée de citoyen.ne.s. L’idée d’une justice internationale - telle qu’elle apparut lors des Procès de Nuremberg après la Seconde Guerre Mondiale - disparut des radars durant de nombreuses années avant de réapparaître grâce au

http://www.forensic-architecture.org/theme/drift/ !19

Tribunal Pénal International pour l’ex-Yougoslavie près de 50 ans plus tard. Actuellement, des forums similaires sont occupés à se multiplier et s’agrandir. Ils commencent à inclure des courts de Justice nationales, en leur permettant d’exercer une juridiction universelle, de nouvelles institutions, ainsi que des commissions et des conseils pour les Droits de l’Homme. Toutefois, cette “justice internationale” est encore un produit d’exportation européenne28.

Contrairement à des courts de justice classiques, les établissement où se déroulent les forums de justice internationale sont souvent modeste. Ceux-ci prennent place dans des locaux improvisés, des bureaux loués ou encore des salles de fêtes ou de sports. Cela prouve bien la grande importance apportée à la fonction que ceux-ci doivent remplir et non pas leur intérêt physique.

L’”agoracentrisme” de ces tribunaux internationaux signifie qu’ils sont apparus comme des espaces de médias d’une manière dont les courts traditionnelles - encore largement allergique à la présence de média - ne sont pas autorisées. L’architecture et la disposition physique des tribunaux répondent au média par lequel ils opèrent. Les interactions face-à-face sont remplacées par des interrogations face-à-écran voir

voir cartes en annexe !20

même d’écran-à-écran. Le processus légal se déroule grandement comme le travail des studios de diffusion, utilisant un réseau d'installations

comparable pour enregistrer, stocker, archiver et

transmettre les images et les sons dont il dépend.

FIGURE-GROUND Comme dit dans le point précédent, il existe deux types de zones d’opération dont traite les ‘forensics’ : le terrain et le forum. Nous avons expliqué ce qu’était un forum et les implications contemporaines de celui-ci. Il sera question dans ce point-ci de l’autre zone d’opération : le terrain.

Il a toujours existé une relation entre l’être humain et la nature qui l’entoure. Pendant longtemps nous avons considéré le sol comme un canevas sur le lequel se dessine les actions qui se sont déroulées au fil du temps et de l’Histoire. Avec l’apparition de l’Anthropocène29, cette considération changea. Le sol est dorénavant vu comme quelque chose que nous transformons avec chacune de nos actions ainsi que

L’Anthropocène est un terme de chronologie géologique proposé pour caractériser l'époque de l'histoire de la Terre qui a débuté lorsque les activités humaines ont eu un impact global significatif sur l'écosystème terrestre. Ce terme a été popularisé à la fin du xxe siècle par le météorologue et chimiste de l'atmosphère Paul Crutzen, prix Nobel de chimie en 1995, pour désigner une nouvelle époque géologique, qui aurait débuté selon lui à la fin du xviiie siècle avec la révolution industrielle, et succéderait ainsi à l’Holocène. - https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Anthropocène 29

!21

comme un agent dans l’enchevêtrement des processus naturel et historique.30 La relation entre la cause et l’effet dans le droit pénal est relativement linéaire. Il y a un agresseur et une victime, un acte violent et des traces matérielles de celui-ci. En opposition il existe ce que le projet Forensic Architecture appelle la ‘causalité du terrain’. Cette causalité est liée au fait que le terrain n’est pas vu comme un fond neutre sur lequel se développent les activités humaines, mais comme “un tissu dense de relations latérales, d’associations et de chaînes d'activité qui sert d'intermédiaire entre les échelles et les tendances matérielles de larges environnements, de particuliers et d’une action collective.”31 À cause de cela, cette ‘causalité du terrain’ est difficilement quantifiable contrairement à ce qu’on pourrait faire dans d’autres cas plus simple du droit pénal. Il y aura toujours plus de connections et de relations qui se développeront avec le temps et l’avancement de l’enquête. Un conflit armé par exemple est tellement plus aucune histoire de ‘méchants’ et de ‘gentils’, cela soulève aussi des questions politiques, économiques, sociales, culturelles, géographiques, religieuses, et bien d’autres encore.

Comprendre ici que le sol représente plus qu’un simple échos de l’Histoire, plus qu’un espace neutre; il a un impact sur le déroulement de cette même Histoire. 30

http://www.forensic-architecture.org/lexicon/field-causality/ !22

Afin de parvenir à établir une causalité du terrain il est nécessaire d’impliquer de nombreux groupes et agences qui analysent en parallèle les un.e.s des autres et se tiennent constamment au courant des avancées effectuées. En effet, “là où la causalité linéaire se concentre sur une séquence temporelle des évènements, la causalité du terrain implique l’arrangement des causes dans un ensemble de relations spatiales mutuelles”32

Ce ne sont pas les forums juridiques qui sont ici les mieux à même de traiter avec les causalités du terrain mais bien les forums politiques; d’où l’importance du retour à l’origine historique du terme ‘forensic’. Le but ici n’étant pas de punir quelques individus coupables mais bien d’établir une base matérielle permettant une compréhension plus globale et, qui sait, une reconfiguration du territoire politique, économique et naturel.33

OSTEOBIOGRAPHIES L’exhumation légale est devenue, au cours des dernières décennies, une ressource historique, politique et légale grandissante. Malgré cela cette méthode ne produisit pas une alternative suffisamment fiable et fixe face aux incertitudes et ambiguïtés humaines.

ibid.

Le lien peut facilement être fait entre le cas de l’effondrement de l'usine de textile en 2013 ainsi que l’enquête qui a suivit et ce que nous venons d’expliquer dans ce point. 33

!23

Les découvertes faites étaient soumises au doute, à des question de probabilité et des marges d’erreurs. La pratique en elle même devint politisée. La manière de présenter et d’obtenir les informations devinrent aussi, voir parfois plus, importante que l’information en tant que telle. Pour un oeil non averti, un os ressemblera à un autre. Un crâne, dépourvu de muscles et de peau, n’exprime pas la même chose qu’un visage. Mais tout comme les bâtiments, les os sont aussi soumis aux attaques du temps. Le travail, la position géographique, l’alimentation, les habitudes, les maladies et les violences laissent des marques qu’il est possible de lire. Afin de pouvoir présenter de manière effective ces découvertes, il faut pouvoir les interpréter de manière efficace. Là où l’analyse ADN permet d’établir l’identité d’un corps, l’analyse des os (appelée ostéobiographie) cherche à démontrer la manière dont tout une vie est enregistrée dans la forme et la texture d’un squelette. Cette nouvelle approche permet d’utiliser le ‘témoignage’ d’un squelette de la même manière que celui d’un être humain.

PREDICTIVES FORENSICS Les ‘predictives forensics’ sont une manière d’enquêter qui cherche à prouver la possibilité d’un évènement qui n’a pas encore pris place. Cette technique est employée pour le moment dans deux domaines non-liés : la science environnementale, qui utilise des modèles pour calculer les risques planétaires associés au réchauffement

!24

climatique; et la ‘security analysis’34 , qui cherche à prédire les risques rencontrés dans la Lutte contre le Terrorisme.

Un modèle climatique est une construction mathématique basée sur des informations pré-existantes afin de prédire des scénarios possibles. C’est aussi une image, une représentation visuelle et temporelle à diverse échelle. Tout comme une photo est limitée par sa résolution, un modèle de ce type est limité par ses variables et le nombre limité de celle-ci qu’il possède. Les informations n’étant pas disponible en même quantité partout, ces modèles n’ont pas même degré de précision partout.

Un des modes d’actions les plus fréquent ces dernières années dans la lutte contre le terrorisme implique des ‘assassinassions

ciblées

préventives’ - le plus souvent grâce à un drone. Dans ce type d’opération, la victime n’est pas tuée en rétribution pour des actions passées mais afin de prévenir de futures actions possibles. Ce genre d’actions préventives se fait sur base de calculs complexes prenant en compte de nombreuses variables; mais quelles peuvent être les répercussions d’une telle action ? Les analystes !34 La ‘security analysis’ est l’analyse d’instruments financiers (titres ou contrats) appelés ‘securities’. Ces ‘securities’ font parties intégrante du marché économique. Cette analyse peut être divisée entre l’analyse fondamentale sur base de facteurs fondamentaux d’entreprise, et l’analyse technique qui se concentre sur l’évolution des prix. Un troisième type d’analyse (l’analyse quantitative) peut se référer aux indicateurs utilisés dans les deux premiers types. !25

extrapolent sur base des comportements et déplacements des personnes ciblées, tout comme ils le font pour calculer les fluctuations des marchés économique.

THRESHOLD OF DETECTABILITY “Un trou n’est pas simplement une absence.”35 Un trou apporte plus d’information qu’on pourrait le penser à première vue. Il informe sur le matériau qu’il a perforé mais aussi sur la forme de cette absence.

La lutte contre le terrorisme implique des assassinassions ciblées préventives. Celles-ci sont souvent exécutées grâce à des missiles tirés depuis des drones, invisibles et silencieux. Ces missiles percent un trou dans le toit avant d’exploser profondément à l’intérieur du bâtiment. Comme expliqué précédemment, la résolution maximale des images satellites publiquement disponibles est limitée à 50 cm par pixel. Les trous que laissent ces missiles sont tellement petit qu’ils sont à la “limite de détectabilité ” et peuvent sembler n’être qu’une variation dans la tonalité, un simple pixel plus sombre.

Ce seuil de détectabilité a un impact conséquent dans la manière de traquer les attaques par drone via l’imagerie satellite, souvent l’outil

http://www.forensic-architecture.org/theme/threshold-detectability/ !26

permettant, dans ce genre d’enquête, de s’approcher le plus de la zone touchée.

Ce sont les conditions - légales, politiques, techniques - qui empêchent les enquêteurs d’avoir accès à un matériel suffisamment performant pour correctement faire leur travail, ou du moins qui ne leur facilitent aucunement la tâche.

!27

CONCLUSION

Dans notre monde qui avance non pas à deux mais à bien plus de vitesses, il est important de créer ou de voir se créer des balises. Ces balises ont pour rôle de suivre, enregistre et analyser les exactions commises par tous afin de garder la tête du monde sur ses épaules. Entre les crises économiques qui ont des répercussions planétaires, les débats sociaux perpétuellement alimentés via les réseaux sociaux et les médias classiques, les questions politiques et les extrémismes qui ne semblent pas vouloir disparaitre (bien au contraire) les catastrophes climatiques et les scandales qui éclaboussent régulièrement ceux qui sont au sommet; entre tout ça et plus encore, il n’est pas anormal d’avoir la tête qui tourne. Quand chaque acte, chaque mot prononcé et geste effectué peut se retrouver du jour au lendemain catapulté au centre de l’attention mondiale, connoté, décrypté, analysé. Quand chacun peut y aller de son avis dans un débat qui se déroule entre les quatre coins du monde (un monde dans lequel nous essayons tant bien que mal de coexister). Dans un tel environnement, il est important d’avoir des outils qui permettent de combattre les injustices, de combattre les torts fait à des communautés entières, de combattre pour nos droits les plus basiques.36 Il est important de noter que des droits impliquent aussi des responsabilités, chose que certaines personnes ont parfois tendance à oublier ou à mettre de côté. 36

!28

Notre monde est beaucoup plus complexe que ce qu’il a pu être auparavant. Cette complexité est ce qui le rend d’autant plus beau et intéressant, mais c’est aussi ce qui le rend plus difficile à cerner, à comprendre.

Comme expliqué au cours de cette analyse, de nombreuses violations des Droits de l’Homme et des Droits Internationaux Humanitaires prennent places de part le monde. Les personnes ou groupes de personnes responsables agissaient en totale impunité car aucune structure globale existait pour les combattre. Les avancées technologiques de ces dernières décennies et l’éveil collectif à des idées et des valeurs plus grandes que sa propre personne, ont poussé.e.s à

l’apparition de groupes combattant avec toujours plus d’efficacité

ces coupables. La collaboration d’acteurs spécialistes de divers domaines et la réappropriation des ‘forensics’ par des groupes qui ne sont pas liés à un état grâce à la diversité de leurs membres permet une remise en question de ces mêmes ‘forensics’. En revenant à la signification historique du terme, nous, l’ensemble des populations, nous réveillons petit à petit d’une léthargie qui nous a frappé il y a bien longtemps, quand nous avons troqué notre liberté contre de la sécurité.37 Ce que certains semblent encore prêt à faire dans de nombreux pays malheureusement, que ce soit de manière consciente ou non. 37

!29

L’idée est donc d’imaginer un espace, tel un forum romain contemporain, où se recréerait une discussion globale au niveau légal mais aussi aux niveaux économique, politique et pourquoi pas social et environnemental. Cette discussion pourrait s’agrandir afin d’accueillir non pas uniquement des spécialistes et des professionnels mais aussi un ensemble de personnes cherchant à ajouter une voix et un avis constructif à un ensemble plus grand qu’eux, plus grand que quiconque. Certains sites internet fonctionnent déjà d’une manière similaire permettent d’apporter une réelle richesse dans des débats et des discussions sur de nombreux sujets38.

Nous avons fait le premier pas en revenant à une définition plus large de ce que devraient être les ‘forensics’.

À quand le second dans lequel nous reprenons le contrôle de notre monde en obligeant les personnes qui se pensent au dessus des lois à prendre leurs responsabilités suite à leurs actions ?

Certaines questions d’utilisateurs des sites internet Reddit ou Youtube furent utilisée lors de certains débats politiques aux Etats-Unis, ce qui permet une plus grande implication de la part de la population dans la vie politique de leur pays. Ces questions sont même parfois plus développées, poussées voir intéressantes que celles posées par des journalistes spécialisés lors des heures de grandes écoutes. 38

!30

BIBLIOGRAPHIE - FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE - Forensis : The Architecture of Public Truth. Londres, mars 2014. pp. 9-31

- HAUS DER KULTUREN DER WELT - Exhibition Guide Forensis. Berlin, 2014. 75 pages

WEBOGRAPHIE

- AUC. - Anthropocène [en ligne] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocène visite : 10 juin 2016. dernière mise à jour : 14 juin 2016, à 13:49.

- AUC. - Forensic Architecture [en ligne] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Forensic_Architecture visite : 08 juin 2016 - dernière mise à jour en date de visite : 17 mai 2016 à 00:23

- AUC. - Forensis [en ligne] https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/forensis visite le 09 juin 2016 dernière mise à jour en date de visite : 12 mars 2015, à 07:46

- CONSEIL EUROPEEN DE LA RECHERCHE [en ligne] https://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/ files/document/file/erc_2010_stg_results_all%20domains.pdf visite : 09 juin 2016

- FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE - Forensic Architecture [en ligne] http://www.forensicarchitecture.org visite : 08 juin 2016

- LE POINT.FR - Bangladesh : plus de 1 000 morts dans l'effondrement d'un immeuble [en ligne] http://www.lepoint.fr/monde/bangladesh-plus-de-1-000-morts-dans-leffondrement-d-un-immeuble-10-05-2013-1665191_24.php visite : 11 juin 2016. Publié le 10/05/2013 à 08:20. Modifié le 10/05/2013 à 09:52

- OXFORD DICTIONARIES - Forensic [en ligne] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/ definition/english/forensic visite : 09 juin 2016

!31

ANNEXES Les documents qui sont mis en en annexe de ce travail sont là en titre de compléments pour permettre au lecteur d’aller plus en profondeur par rapport à ce qui a été dit dans cette analyse.

!32

HOW TO TRANSLATE THE TERM “FORENSIC” IN FRENCH ? The translation into French of the English term “forensic” poses certain problems. In English the French terms “médico-légal” (medicolegal) and “judiciaire” (judicial) are compounded under the more general term “forensic”. In French, their use tends to vary with the country in which forensic anthropologists or pathologists work. It should also be noted that archaeologists and anthropologists have become involved in criminal investigations only very recently. One consequence of their recent presence is the ambiguity in defining their role in criminal investigations, which is also reflected in their titles. Here we try to shed light on the vocabulary used in the forensic field, or rather in the “médico-légal” discipline, by using articles and professional websites but also through the valuable advice of French-speaking forensic experts. The “Médico-légal” discipline refers to the medical examiner in charge of conducting expert analysis for judicial institutions (gathering pieces of evidence which may be brought before court). It includes three sub-areas of specialization: medicolegal pathology, medicolegal odontology and medicolegal anthropology. It is clear that the term “anthropologie médico-légale” (medicolegal anthropology) is the most widely used in France and Belgium. For example, Inrap1 uses it on its website2. It is a preferred term as it can be classified in various sub-disciplines of anthropology. Moreover, it reflects both the methods used (i.e. in relation to anatomy) and the framework within which they are practiced (i.e. judicial). In France and Belgium, the anthropologist taking a role in judicial activities is a medical examiner (doctor) who has specialized in anthropology, hence a preference for the term medicolegal anthropologist. This is where we observe the main difference between the Francophone and the North American system; in the latter training and education in physical anthropology is obtained in a department of anthropology, rather than medicine. Furthermore, the use of specialists who are not medical doctors – who might study clues not directly linked to the corpse or be involved in genetic analysis – during criminal cases is rare in Europe but if necessary one can refer to the use of the term “judicial expert”3. The term “judicial” is relative to the institutions of justice and do not contain any clinical or anatomical connotation. This term tends to be used more often in French-speaking regions of Canada. On the Translation Bureau website4, “forensic anthropology” is translated directly as “anthropologie judiciaire”5. Also, the informative text of the Canadian Society of Forensic Science uses the following terms: “chimie judiciaire”, “toxicologie judiciaire”, “odontologie judiciaire”, “pathologie judiciaire”, “biologie judiciaire” and finally also “anthropologie judiciaire”6. This very last term conveniently omits the medical concept because in Canada, as elsewhere in North America, the anthropologist is not necessarily a medical doctor.

The French common definition of “forensic” is vague as it refers to something related to or used in public debate or argument. While the latter meaning exists in English, the second English meaning7 does not yet have an equivalent in the official French dictionary. The use of the term “forensic anthropology” seems more difficult or more complex for the [francophone] layman. The only French-speaking country where its use appears to be systematic and is assumed as an Anglicism is Switzerland. The University of Lausanne defines it as follows8: “The forensic science is defined as the set of scientific principles and technical methods applied to solve issues in criminal, civil, and regulatory development in order to help justice [...]. The word forensic [...] is a neologism. It comes from the Latin forum9 [...]. It is part of the vocabulary of virtually all languages that are close to ours as German, Italian and English, but its use is recent in French.” The University of Lausanne also employs the neologism in the title of its courses: “Sciences forensiques”10, “Identification forensique”, “Génétique forensique”. In addition, the University Center of Legal Medicine (CURML, Lausanne and Geneva, Switzerland) has three departments named Unité de médecine forensique (UMF), Unité de toxicologie et de chimie forensique (UTCF) and Unité de génétique forensique (UGF)11. The term is perfectly integrated. One additional example is an article on forensic medical imaging dated to July 200812. Outside of Switzerland, uses of the term “forensic” are uncommon. For example, the University of Alberta (Canada) has one course named “Anthropologie forensique”13. In France in 2010, Inrap supported a project entitled14 : Archéologie et anthropologie forensiques : modifications de surface osseuse d’origine anthropique15. Overall, the term “forensic” is more akin to what relates to criminalistics in general (that is, techniques applied by police analysts for the use of evidence collected in criminal investigations) and should be used only in cases where the audience is aware of the meaning. The key problem is not in the use of any these terms but rather the context or country in which they are used. In France and Belgium, people with a background in biological anthropology study skeletons of antiquity greater than thirty years but are very rarely hired in criminal investigations. Investigations of the latter kind will result in a call to medical doctors who have a specialization in forensic anthropology. This is not the pattern in North America. But in the end, the techniques used by both groups will be identical when only bones remain, making the terms “medicolegal anthropologist”, “judicial anthropologist” and “forensic anthropologist” synonymous. Our choice in terms while translating in the discipline must depend upon the training received by the person we are mentioning and/or the background of the country in which a case occurs.

Institut National de Recherches Archéologiques Préventives. (National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research). 2 • « Archéologie et anthropologie médico-légale » (“Medicolegal anthropology and archaeology”. Source : www.inrap.fr/via_podcast/p-1774-L-archeologie-et-l-anthropologie-medico-legales-da.htm; accessed on 13 December 2010). 3 • « Expert judiciaire ». 4 • Translation Bureau (Termium Plus), Public Works and government services, www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/site/termium.php?lang=fra&cont=001. 5 • Read “judicial anthropology”. 6 • Read, “judicial chemistry”, “judicial toxicology”, “judicial dentistry”, “judicial pathology”, “judicial biology”. 7 • “Used or applied in the investigation and establishment of facts or evidence in a court of law; “forensic photograph”, “forensic ballistics”. Source : http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=forensic; accessed on 13 December 2010). 8 • http://www.bk.admin.ch/dokumentation/publikationen/00292/03397/index.html?lang=fr 9 • Public place of debate and courts in Antiquity. 10 • Read “Forensic science”, “Forensic identification”, “Forensic genetics”. 11 • Read “Forensic Medicine Unit”, “Unit of Forensic Toxicology and Chemistry” and “Unit of Forensic Genetics”. 12 • http://revue.medhyg.ch/article.php3?sid=33345 (accessed on 13 December 2010). 13 • Read “Forensic Anthropology”. 14 • http://www.inrap.fr/archeologie-preventive/La-Recherche/Programmes-et-collaborations/ Projets-d-activite-scientifique-PAS-/p-9546-Les-publications-hors-cadre-des-APP-superieures-a-.htm (accessed on 13 December 2010). 15 • Read “Forensic anthropology and forensic archaeology: changes in bone surface of anthropogenic origin”. •

THE GAZA BOOK OF DESTRUCTION

‘A VERIFICATION OF BUILDING– DESTRUCTION RESULTING FROM ATTACKS BY THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION’, 2009 ‘Existing at the intersection of architecture, history and the laws of war, forensic architecture reconstruct scenes of violence as they are inscribed in built environments.’ — Eyal Weizman During the Israeli attack of Gaza in December 2008–January 2009 some 1,400 people were killed, 50,000 displaced and 15,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged. A few months later, in the spring of 2009, the Gaza-based and Hamas- run Ministry of Public Works and Housing started compiling an archive entitled A Verification of Building– Destruction Resulting from Attacks by the Israeli Occupation. This ‘book of destruction’ can also be read as an archive of damaged materials. Each photograph displays a catalogue number spraypainted onto the walls or onto the rubble itself or on a paper held up in front of the camera. The first letter stands for the location: ‘G’ is Gaza City, ‘N’ the northern sector of the Strip, ‘K’ is for Khan Younis and ‘R’ for Rafah. The digits following the letters designate the relevant neighbourhood, road and plot. The classification is based on an area grid system that covers the entire Gaza Strip. Each existing and potential building site in Gaza—those ruined and those still intact—have thus been designated as a possible site of destruction. Each entry detailed the size of the plot and the building, the type of construction and, sometimes, plans of the buildings. Each file also recorded how the damage to the building was inflicted: ‘destroyed by armoured D9 bulldozers’, ‘bombed from the air’, ‘shelled from the ground’... The archive also includes information about the use of the building, and the names of the people that owned or lived in it. Many entries included photocopies of UNRWA cards, indicating that the buildings’ inhabitants were refugees supported by international welfare. For refugees, camps were shelters but were also seen as sites of great political significance, the material testimony of four hundred cities and villages destroyed between 1947–49. This is the reason that refugees sometimes refer to the destruction of camps as ‘the destruction of destruction’, an ongoing process of destruction. A historical continuum of ongoing destruction and denial, a ‘single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble’. EYAL WEIZMAN The photographs and captions are taken from A Verification of Building – Destruction Resulting from Attacks by the Israeli Occupation, an archive assembled by the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Public Works and Housing in 2009.

A DRONE STRIKE IN MIRANSHAH

INVESTIGATING VIDEO-TESTIMONY 2013 ‘These fragments are designed to kill the people inside of a building but to leave the structure intact. Seen from above, the small hole in the roof is the only visible trace that indicates that the room under it has become the assassination chamber.’ —Eyal Weizman Since June 2004 one of the frontiers for the drone campaign has been Waziristan, a Pakistani frontier region. Both the military and militants prevent bringing in and taking out electronic paraphernalia, including navigation equipment, mobile phones and cameras. The consequence is a media siege where only very few photographs and eyewitness testimonies are available outside these regions. This media blackout is the enabling condition of drone warfare. Satellite images available are of a resolution in which the damage caused by drone strikes is invisible—resolution is of 50 cm/pixel, with a pixel representing half a metre by half a metre of ground. So the forensic problem is identifying a hole in a roof. A hole in a roof—the signature of a drone strike—would appear as nothing more than a slight colour variation, a single darker pixel perhaps. All data under the size of a pixel is thus defined as an extraterritorial zone. Drone strikes are executed at a significantly higher resolution than that of satellite photographs of the kind the NGOs or the UN use to monitor attacks. So, one of the foundational principles of forensics since the nineteenth century is inverted: to resolve a crime the police should be able to see more, using better optics, than the perpetrator of the crime. Here it is state agencies that do the killings and independent organizations the forensics. The differential in visual capacity to see is the space of denial. Aftermath of a drone strike on 30 March 2012 in Miranshah, Waziristan, in which four people were reportedly killed, Forensic Architecture investigated using spatial information taken from a very rare amateur video-testimony of 22 seconds, to model the strike. The analysis constitutes part of an international investigation on Counter Terrorism and Human Rights and was presented to the UN General Assembly in New York on 25 October 2013. EYAL WEIZMAN Video Decoding video testimony, Miranshah, Pakistan, March 30, 2012 realized by Forensic Architecture in collaboration with SITU Research (2013). Principal investigator: Eyal Weizman; research and coordination: Susan Schuppli; video research and editing: Steffen Krämer; research: Jacob Burns, Zahra Hussain, Francesco Sebregondi, Blake Fisher, Shela Sheikh; architectural modelling: Reiner Beelitz, Samir Harb; commentary: Shela Sheikh. With thanks to: Chris Woods, Mirza Shahzad Akbar, Edmund Clark (photographs) and Chris Cobb-Smith.

BIOGRAPHIES JAMES BRISCOE is an American archaeologist with expertise in forensics, historical and military archaeology. He was an early member of the Society of Professional Archaeologists. He has authored and co-authored over 2,000 reports including the original draft of the report on the destruction of Koreme. CHRISTIAN DELAGE is a French historian and filmmaker. A teacher at the University of Paris 8, he has been the director of the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent (research unit at the CNRS) since 2014. He is the author of La Vérité par l’image. de Nuremberg à Milosevic (2006), and he realized the film, Nuremberg, les nazis face à leurs crimes (2006). He curated the exhibition Filming the Camps–John Ford, Samuel Fuller, George Stevens: from Hollywood to Nuremberg (2010). THOMAS KEENAN teaches media theory and human rights at Bard College (USA). He is the co-author, with Eyal Wiezman, of Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics (2012). He also curated Antiphotojournalism (2010). TOMASZ KIZNY is a photographer and a journalist. He is also the founder of ‘Dementi’ Independent Photographic Agency, established following the implementation of martial law in Poland, which has documented ‘Solidarity’ strikes, demonstrations, social resistance in Poland and then the collapse of communist systems. He is the author of the book Gulag (2004) and The Great Terror, 1937-1938 (2013). LUCE LEBART is a photographic historian and exhibition curator, and director of the photography collection at the Société Française de Photographie. She is the author of books and articles on scientific and documentary photography and on the history of photographic conservation, and a specialist in photographic procedures and systems. SUSAN MEISELAS joined Magnum Photos in 1976. She is best known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. In 1991, she started the project Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History about history of Kurdistan and developed akaKurdistan, an online site of exchange for Kurdish collective memory. ANTHONY PETITEAU is in charge of the photography collection at the Prints, Drawings and Photography department at the Musée de l’Armée in Paris. He specialises in the photographic portrayal of combatants and wars from the nineteenth century up to the present day. He has curated a number of exhibitions including Vu du front. Représenter la Grande Guerre (Paris, 2014); and 100 ans de photographie aux armées (Paris, 2015). FAZAL SHEIKH frequently uses photographs and texts to document people living in displaced and marginalized communities. Early publications, A Sense of Common Ground (1996) and The Victor Weeps(1998), confront the legacy of war in Africa and Afghanistan. His recent work in Israel/Palestine led to Desert Bloom, a volume comprised of Sheikh’s aerial images recording the transformation of the Negev. ERIC STOVER is Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center and Adjunct Professor of Law and Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1977, Stover has conducted investigations of war crimes and human rights abuses in over a dozen countries, including missions to Bosnia and Croatia for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and in Rwandan after the genocide in 1994. EYAL WEIZMAN is an architect, professor and Director of the Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2011 he has also been directing Forensic Architecture, a multidisciplinary forensic laboratory of architects, artists and filmmakers whose investigations have provided evidence for political groups, international prosecution teams, NGOs and the United Nations. The work of the team has been collected in the exhibition presented in 2014, Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (co-curated with Anselm Franke) and in the eponymous book.

BURDEN OF PROOF: THE CONSTRUCTION OF VISUAL EVIDENCE This exhibition examines the way experts, researchers and historians produce images as evidence in instances of crimes or acts of violence suffered by individuals or groups. Eleven cases are presented, spanning the period from the invention by Alphonse Bertillon of ‘metric’ photography of crime scenes in the nineteenth century to the reconstruction of a drone attack in Pakistan in 2012. Photography reveals, records, validates, certifies. Coming not long after the invention of the medium, everyday use of photographs in the courtroom made the image’s power as truth an essential tool of conviction in the service of justice. But what can we really learn from what we see in an image? As we know, the image reveals, but it also simultaneously conceals, providing misleading, truncated or partial clues to what took place. More than any other, the criminal act stands revealed as opaque, defying description or representation. Into the substance of the image are etched a host of clear indicators along with other, imprecise ones: significant detail is mixed with illusion. Thus the image is always in itself an enigma, demanding that we articulate what it really shows. The task of the experts, then, is to construct an image system, an artifice capable of revealing the image’s substance—its inner truth. Richard Helmer overlays the images of the skull and the faces of Josef Mengele, the Gaza ‘Book of Destruction’ inventories the buildings destroyed in Gaza, in 2009. The aim of the visual system is to show that which, in theory, cannot be seen. It makes the invisible visible, according to Rodolphe A. Reiss. Paradoxically, the objective character of the forensic image is something that is worked on and constructed. To be effective, the system must do away with the expert’s subjectivity: it must achieve an ideal transparency of image and neutrality of point of view. The disappearance of the expert as author: this is the price to be paid for the image to become acceptable as evidence. This seeming absence of style

ALPHONSE BERTILLON

METRIC PHOTOGRAPHY OF CRIME SCENES, 1903 ‘The victim has fallen on his back and is lying full length on the ground. The task is to establish the position of the corpse exactly on the photographic plate. But for this to be feasible, all the parts of the body visible to the eye must be equally visible in the photograph.’ — Rodolphe A. Reiss In the late nineteenth century advances in psychology were challenging the reliability of memory as less a recording than a reconstruction of facts. In a quest for objectivity new methods of investigation were developed. Merging photography with the use of measurements, calculations, and plans, these methods were the beginning of police technology. Their originator—and the inventor of anthropometric description—was the Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914), whose work was followed by Englishman Francis Galton’s honing of fingerprinting. In 1903, Bertillon established a scientific protocol for the representation of crime scenes. Since 1882, he had become head of the photography department. The photographs were taken with an ‘overhead’ camera, equipped with a wide-angle lens, set on a tripod more than two metres tall. The images were then mounted on special cards offering gradations in centimetres, perspectometric framing and indications of scale. This elaborate representation system provided a unified, overall view of the event’s material elements: the position of the body and of any weapons, other objects and traces. The aim of the French inventor is ‘to produce directly, with no instrument other than the lens, photographs which could be utilised as actual geometrical plans in cross-section, elevation and horizontal projection, and which, with the aid of simple

constitutes a style in itself. The production of a visually neutral form is a stylistic exercise. In another paradox, the image produced often masks the personal dimension of the crime, despite the fact that the purpose of the image is to identify the victim and the perpetrator. Bertillon’s photos as a rule adopt a supra-human point of view to take the crime scene in its entirety. The accumulation of portraits of the victims of the Great Terror reveals the sheer extent of a state crime. Getting at the truth, though, is a complex and perilous exercise, involving calculations of probability and margins of error. The expert only comes up with fragile clues, a hypothetical scenario, scraps of the truth. In the final analysis, the ultimate validation of the image hinges on the word, on the rhetorical art of persuasion as practiced in the forum of the courtroom. To exhibit images of violence is to remove them from their habitual framework. Here we have tried to understand how, when and by whom they were produced, and to suggest a critical perspective on their status. For the investigator as for the viewer/ reader, to implement a thought process through pictures is to open a window onto the truth. DIANE DUFOUR

Exhibition curated by Diane Dufour with Luce Lebart, Christian Delage and Eyal Weizman in collaboration with Jennifer L. Mnookin, Anthony Petiteau, Tomasz Kizny, Thomas Keenan and Eric Stover Co-produced by The Photographers’ Gallery, LE BAL, Paris and the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam ‘Photographs may indeed be evidence—but evidence of what exactly? That is a question that cannot be answered by the photograph alone.’ — Jennifer L. Mnookin

rules and calculations, would be capable of providing the shapes and exact dimensions of the objects shown.’ In addition to the identification of corpses, metric photography was also used to record and exactly recreate crime scenes for the police, investigating judges and jurors. As Bertillon had realised, the photographs could also have a psychological influence, either on the accused, by inducing a confession, or on judges: ‘A good photograph will often advantageously replace the longest of prosecution speeches’, wrote Bertillon’s Swiss disciple Rodolphe Archibald Reiss. Moreover, such a photograph is ‘a permanent reconstruction of the scene, always to hand for the investigating magistrate’. The metric photography foreshadows today’s 3D recreation of crime scenes. LUCE LEBART Silver prints mounted on scaled cards from the Service de l’Identité Judicaire at the Préfecture de Police in Paris.

RODOLPHE A. REISS

TRACES, MARKS, PRINTS: REVEALING DETAILS INVISIBLE TO THE NAKED EYE, 1903 ‘Examination of these footprints clearly demonstrates that the individual in question took off his shoes before entering the room, walked on tiptoe (only the front part of each foot shows up) and was wearing chunky knit socks which he had soiled slightly when climbing along the guttering.’ — Rodolphe A. Reiss Chemist and photographer, Rodolphe A. Reiss was appointed to the world’s first chair of forensic science in 1906 at the University of Lausanne. He founded the Institute of Forensic Science there, in 1909. For this pioneer in technical investigative work, every aspect of an investigation—research at the crime scene,

establishing topography, examination of cadavers, the search for traces, prints and other evidentiary marks—now demanded photography. The Reiss view chimed with the emphasis on the virtues of precision and truthfulness then holding sway in scientific and utilitarian image circles. Photography, the astrophysician Jules Janssen reiterated, was ‘the expert’s true retina’. ‘It has become humanity’s artificial memory’, Reiss would write in the Revue Suisse de Photographie (Swiss Journal of Photography). Any photographic approach to a crime scene must begin with an overview. Then the photographer should gradually home in on the corpse following up all traces. Matters of detail are fundamental for the crime investigator: ‘Certain details may [otherwise] be completely overlooked, and very often such details become crucial in the course of the investigation.’ Linen, tools, bottles... were photographed with a view camera on the scene crime and/ or analysed on photographs in laboratory. Whereas Bertillon’s images of crime scenes were encapsulations, Reiss’s were more analytical, in the sense of breaking the scene down into its components. Often at the centre of the images and photographed from different angles, objects were rephotographed against a neutral, standardised backdrop. Perspective effects were minimised and full-scale rendering made prioritized. These photographs were capable to reveal details invisible to the naked eye, they confirmed Reiss’s axiom: ‘The camera sees everything and records everything.’ LUCE LEBART Contemporary prints, after the original silver gelatine glass negatives from the Reiss collection held by the Institut de Police Scientifique in the School of Forensic Science at the University of Lausanne.

THE MAN OF THE SHROUD

THE ‘FIRST CRIME PHOTOGRAPH’, 1902–39 ‘We can only see what we are looking for and we look for what is already in our minds.’ Alphonse Bertillon Secondo Pia, amateur photographer, took the first photographs of the Holy Shroud when it was publicly displayed in Turin in 1898. Some 4.36 metres long and 1.10 metres wide, the piece of fabric was reputed to have retained ‘faint traces’ of an imprint of Christ’s body and face. The revelation came during the development process, when Pia put his glass negative into the chemical bath: ‘Shut away in my darkroom and engrossed in my work, I was very moved when, during the development, I saw the Holy Face begin to emerge on the plate.’ Strangely, the face and body appeared in positive, whereas the opposite should have been the case. It was as if the fabric was itself a negative, and thus the ‘first crime photograph’. The results were put on show immediately, alongside the shroud, and the scientific debate about its authenticity began. Published in 1902, in an investigative vein and based on Pia’s photographs, the first detailed study of the relic was the work of biologist Paul Vignon, a professor at the Institut Catholique in Paris. The second version, published in 1938, contained new analyses and close-ups of the shroud taken by Enrie. Paul Vignon adduced the theory of an imprint. This imprint would not be solely the result of body-fabric contact, but would also been produced by the chemical action of the body at a distance. According to the word invented by Vignon, the image of the shroud would be ‘vaporographic’. On the shroud, the narrative of the Passion— the crown of thorns, the nails driven through Christ’s hands and ankles, and the marks of the Roman whip on his back—appears in the form of bloodstains and traces of flagellation. As the Christ, the man of the Shroud was crucified and flogged. After testing of samples, the shroud underwent a carbon-dating procedure in 1986. The results were announced by the archbishop of Turin: the linen of the shroud dated from the period 1260–1390 AD and so was not contemporary with Christ. The Holy Shroud would definitively lay it open to challenge and expert appraisal. LUCE LEBART The two first photographs are silver prints made from the original images of the Shroud by Secondo Pia in 1898. The enlargements are the work of Paul Vignon from the photographs taken by Giuseppe Enrie in 1931 and 1933. All the photographs of the Holy Shroud of Turin are part of the Paul Vignon collection of the Fels Library at the Institut Catholique in Paris. The captions are taken from Paul Vignon, Le Saint Suaire de Turin devant la Science, l’Archéologie, l’Histoire, l’iconographie, la Logique, (2nd ed. Paris, Masson & Co., 1939).

WAR SEEN FROM ABOVE

BEFORE AND AFTER BOMBING, 1914 ‘Is that a machine gun or a stump? In other words the act of interpretation demanded that the photograph be treated as an ensemble of ‘‘univalent’’, or indexical signs that could only carry one meaning, that could point to only one object. Effectiveness [of shelling] demanded this illusory certainty.’ — Allan Sekula The use of specialists to convert reconnaissance or observations into drawings was a constant

factor in all wars. The outbreak of World War I, however, brought a radical break with the past, one made possible by two major nineteenth- century innovations: the aeroplane and photography. By 2 August 1914, airborne observers were recording the results of their missions with their personal cameras, convincing General Joffre of the need for specialised aerial reconnaissance units. The stabilisation of the Western Front in autumn 1914 required detailed knowledge of the terrain, constant observation of the enemy’s defences, and ongoing updates of the military maps: photography, which was considered objective, exact and immediate, was crucial to all manoeuvres. The British photographs shown here, reveal a before/after visual protocol. Juxtaposing identical views of the same place taken on two different dates, the aim of these photographic montages was to document as precisely as possible the ‘results of destruction’ prior to large-scale offensives. In Douaumont, in the Verdun sector, the two series produced during the spring and autumn of 1916—before and after the two French offensives aimed at taking the fort—were intended to provide proof that the enemy’s defence capacity had been destroyed by the preliminary bombardments. Ypres, in Belgium, was the focal point of an intense war of attrition necessitating a virtually full-time aerial photography coverage. Today, the analysis of data provided by satellite images is still based on the before/ after approach. Dating from 2 and 7 January 2015, the satellite images provided by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch supplied proof of the extent of the massacres carried out by the Boko Haram terrorist organisation in Baga, Nigeria. ANTHONY PETITEAU The photographs exhibited are the original gelatin silver prints on paper held by the Prints, Drawings and Photography department at the Musée de l’Armée in Paris. The photographs were taken by photographers of the British army’s Royal Flying Corps—the predecessor of the Royal Air Force—and by photographers from the French army’s aerial photography section.

THE GREAT TERROR IN THE USSR

PORTRAITS OF THE VICTIMS OF A STATE CRIME 1937–38 ‘These crimes were committed by a state authority in the name of the state. The problem is that today, in russia there is no official, legal ruling according to which the terror campaigns or certain acts of terror can be classed as criminal.’ Arseny Roginsky, President of the International Association Memorial, Moscow, 2013 Twenty years after the October Revolution the Soviet regime committed a crime against humanity on a scale never before seen in Europe in peacetime: from August 1937 to November 1938, some 750,000 Soviet citizens were sentenced and shot—around 50,000 executions per month. In addition nearly 700,000 people were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment and many would die in the Gulag during the years that followed. All in all the Great Terror would cost close to a million and a half lives. This mass crime was organised by Stalin himself and the inner circle of the Politburo. Before signing their death sentences, the victims were tortured into confessing to absurd crimes and imaginary conspiracies and

naming their ‘accomplices’. An endless series of denunciations led to the arrest, torture and trial of hundreds of thousands. Nobody was safe: top-ranking NKVD personnel, party dignitaries, innocent unknowns, the old and the young were all potential victims. NKVD officials spared no effort and in many regions the arrest quotas laid down in Moscow were actually exceeded. The death sentences were pronounced in series by the famous troikas, and carried out in the basements of NKVD prisons or specially created killing centres in locations that were kept secret. Those arrested were photographed in side and front view against a neutral background, in conformity with the identity photograph norms laid down by Alphonse Bertillon in the second half of the nineteenth century and immediately adopted in Tsarist Russia. To avoid errors, the accused’s name was written directly onto the negative or the print. Many of the victims were photographed a day or two before being executed, and some of them on the day itself. Some documents indicate that the photos were used as confirmation of identity before the sentence was carried out. Despite the efforts of the Stalinist system and its executioners, photographs of the victims of the Great Terror have resurfaced, in an act of resistance that restores the image and memory of people once intended to vanish without a trace. They now represent one of the most telling forms of evidence concerning the crimes of Soviet Communism. TOMASZ KIZNY Slide show of 200 portraits from the central archives of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), the successor to the KGB, and the National Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF), in Moscow. The biographical material comes from the Victims of Political Terror in the USSR database created by the International Association Memorial, in Moscow.

THE NUREMBERG TRIALS

CONFRONTING THE NAZIS WITH THE IMAGES OF THEIR CRIMES, 1945 ‘We will give you undeniable proofs of incredible events.’ Robert H. Jackson, united states chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials What took place on 29 November 1945 in the courtroom where the 21 major Nazi war criminals were on trial was a major innovation in the presentation of ‘incriminating’ images as evidence of ‘crimes against humanity’. On that day, the American prosecutors showed a film, Nazi Concentration Camps, as incriminating evidence. To guarantee the film’s evidentiary status, its images of the discovery of the concentration camps had been made by Allied cameramen according to a precise set of specifications, which give an image-by-image account of the state of the victims and the circumstances of their deaths. The images were to provide a ‘true, accurate, untouched, unchanged, undistorted picturization of the scene’. In Nuremberg, the old court innovated by placing the screen in central position, allowing the public a direct view. Another innovation: the Ford team decided to place a neon tubing just beneath the top of the dock fence to see faces during the projection. ‘It was to put the criminals, all at once, face to face with their infamy, to throw—in a way—the murderers, the butchers of Europe, amid the graves they themselves had constructed, and to capture

the reactions they would emit confronted by these images. The shock’ (Joseph Kessel, correspondent for France Soir in Nuremberg). CHRISTIAN DELAGE Video Le Procès de Nuremberg, l’image comme preuve, realized by Christian Delage and edited by Guillaume Diamant-Berger from documents coming from the American Office of Strategic Services’ Field Photographic Branch, held by the National Archives and Records Administration; and from the George Stevens Collection, at the Library of Congress in Washington DC and the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. Sound recording: Matthieu Deniau (Studio Orlando) Account: François Cognard and Hugo Rigal

BEDOUIN LAND CLAIMS IN THE NEGEV DESERT

HISTORY AT THE THRESHOLD OF DETECTABILITY 1945–2014 ‘These photographs constitute a benchmark record for the condition of palestine before the establishment of israel, and ironically, possible evidence for the existence of these villages to be mobilised against the state.’ — Eyal Weizman In the period between the 1948 war and 1953, the Israeli military expelled about 90 percent of the 100,000 Bedouins of the Negev to the West Bank, Gaza, and further into Jordan and Egypt. Those displacements involved massacres of people, burning of tents, the destruction of houses and the sealing of wells. Demolition, these last years, in the Bedouin settlement of al-‘Araqib form the most recent chapter in what the Israeli media now calls ‘the battle over the Negev’. The most important pieces of evidence that confirm the historical presence of Bedouins on the site are aerial images from times before the establishment of Israel, taken at the end of the Second World War between December 1944 and May 1945 by the Royal Air Force, who conducted a systematic survey of Palestine. In 2013, Regavim, an Israeli organization against Bedouin land claims, maintained that an old cemetery on site—the al-Turi cemetery—could not be seen on these photographs. Therefore the al-Turi families living there were squatters and should be immediately evicted. On 5 January 1945, the reconnaissance pilots overflew al-‘Araqib. With the help of high-resolution scans of the photographs it is possible to see the land of the al-‘Araqib at that time and to locate the old cemetery. From a cruising altitude of 15,000 feet, the image taken by the RAF captures an area of about 3.5 km by 3.5 km. However, because there is 15,000 feet of humid and dusty atmosphere between the ground surface and the film surface, its resolution is faded and the grain represents an area on the ground of about half a meter in diameter. Underneath this ‘threshold of detectability’ a well, for example, and the silver salt grain in the photographic emulsion match. This threshold is an important condition in forensic terms. In a meeting on site in September 2014, Sayakh al- Turi led me to an area of the cemetery in which the graves are marked by small piles of stones. In the area where today’s cemetery is, the 1945 film, at maximum optical magnification, displays a pattern of lighter and darker shades in higher contrast than its surroundings. It only could be small piles of stones.

By reading such traces out of the image, state representatives and the authors of the Regavim report showed themselves to be committed to an active form of ‘not seeing’. EYAL WEIZMAN Contemporary print of the image 5033 taken from the series Palestine Survey by the Royal Air Force. Enlargements realized by Eyal Weizman for The Truth Commission for Exposing Israeli Society’s Responsibility for the Events of 1948–1960. Contemporary print by Fazal Sheikh, Courtesy of the author. Texts and captions: Eyal Weizman.

MENGELE’S SKULL

‘THE TRIAL OF THE BONES’ 1985 ‘Whereas the jerusalem trial of eichmann introduced the ‘‘era of the witness’’, mengele’s case marked a turning point: it is not the human subject, but rather objects, that take centre stage.’ — Eyal Weizman In 1984, the Brazilian police discovered in the suburbs of São Paulo a corpse that could be the one of Josef Mengele, the ‘executioner of Auschwitz’ hunted by the Israeli secret services since the end of the war. The best forensic experts in the world, including Clyde Snow, were appointed to examine and identify the skeleton. Using elements of Mengele’s biography, photographs and medical records, the forensic team went through a very systematic reconstruction of the events and effects of a life as it had been recorded or fossilized into the bones. Snow called this process osteobiography, or the biography of bones. Snow says: ‘Bones make good witnesses. They never lie and they never forget.’ By doing so, the scale of probability that the bones were those of Mengele slowly moved closer to an identification: gender (male), handedness (right), height (174 cm), build (medium), ‘race’ (‘Cauca-soid’), fillings and gaps in the teeth, fractures and accidents as reported in his wartime file and now visible on X-rays (of the hip, thumb, shoulder blade and collarbone), and age at death (64–74 years). But what was needed was an image. Richard Helmer, a German pathologist and a photographer, worked then with a videographic technique that he pioneered, called face-skull superimposition, in which a video image of a photograph is placed over a video image of a skull in order to determine whether the two are the same person. On the monitor, Helmer could control the superimpositions, dividing the face in half, wiping the screen of the photographed face to reveal the skull, and vice versa, substituting one photo for another across Mengele’s life to demonstrate the permanent fit of the skull ‘to the closest millimetre’. The image processor, it seems, could show Josef Mengele alternately dead and alive, half dead and half alive—a spectral presence— present and represented at one and the same time. It was a face wrapped over a skull, subject over object, an image of life over an image of death. These were the missing images. THOMAS KEENAN AND EYAL WEIZMAN The images were made by Richard Helmer in the laboratory of the Medico-Legal Institute in São Paulo, Brazil, in June 1985. Courtesy Maja Helmer. Film 1: (2’36’’) film clip from Mengele’s Skull—The Advent of Forensic Architecture realized by Kerstin Schroedinger and produced for the exhibition Aesthetics, (2012). Courtesy ABC News VideoSource, Dan Setton, Richard Helmer, Maja Helmer, Paulo Tavares. Film 2 (1’ 02’’) and film 3 (1’ 23’’): film clip from Schädelidentifizierung durch elektronische Bildmischung realized by Richard Helmer. Courtesy Maja Helmer.

THE DESTRUCTION OF KOREME

IRAQI KURDISTAN MAPPING MASS GRAVES, 1992 ‘When laid on top of each other, the assembled drawings provide a threedimensional picture of the order of the bodies in the grave pit. This is essential to identify individuals, as survivors recalled the order of who was standing next to who on the firing line.’ — James Briscoe Anfal was a campaign by the Iraqi army to eradicate the 4 millions Kurds of Iraqi Kurdistan. Koreme lies in northern Kurdistan about 50 kilometres from the border with Turkey, and was ‘anfalised’, like 4,000 Kurdish villages. On 28 August 1988, the Iraqi army captured the inhabitants of Koreme. 27 men and boys were executed. Women, children and the elderly were transferred to a concentration camp, in southern Kurdistan. Emptied of its inhabitants, Koreme was then destroyed in its entirety under the direction of special teams of Iraqi army engineers. Between 26 May and 22 June 1992, Middle East Watch, a division of Human Rights Watch, and Physicians for Human Rights assembled an international team of forensic experts, including James Briscoe, a forensic archaeologist, under the scientific direction of forensic anthropologist Dr Clyde Collins Snow. The forensic team exhumed the four grave pits in Koreme. Susan Meiselas, from Magnum Photos, documented the exhumation work. Landmarks in each pit (pit outlines, skulls, other artefacts and bones, etc.) were graphed for each of the drawings made and superimposed on a composite drawing in the laboratory. Skeletons and other evidence were removed to the Dohuk Hospital Morgue where the team undertook reconstruction and identification of each of the 27 skeletons, meticulously documentating the burial location. Considering the report made by experts, for Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights the executions undertaken with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group constitute genocidal acts. Because of the mass scale (it is estimated that 180,000 people have disappeared during the Anfal campaign) MEW/PHR call upon the international community to undertake appropriate measures to punish this ‘crime against humanity’. ERIC STOVER Modern prints by Susan Meiselas and mapping of the village of Koreme and its graves by archaeologist James Briscoe. Courtesy of the authors, Middle East Watch and Physicians for Human Rights.

Sélection d’images provenant du livre “A Verification of Building-Destruction Resulting from Attacks by the Israeli Occupation,” 2009. Source: Palestinian National Authority, Ministry of Public Works and Housing

!33

(ci dessus à gauche) Paris, 25 juin 1848 (ci dessus à droite) Paris, 26 juin 1848 Eugène Thibault, La Barricade dans la rue Saint-Maur-Popincourt avant et après l’attaque par les troupes du Général Lamoricière. 25 et 26 juin1848, daguerréotypes. Source: Musée d’Orsay / Réunion des musées nationaux.

(ci dessus à gauche) 2003 (ci dessus à droite) 2007 Darfour, Soudan. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) montrant la vigueur croissante de l’herbe et des arbustes (principalement) entre 2003 et 2007. Image: © Russell F. Schimmer. Original source: Russell F. Schimmer, Suivi du Genocide au Darfour: Déplacement de la population enregistrée par télédétection, Programme sur l’Etude des Génocides, Working Paper no. 36, Yale University, 2008.

!34

(ci dessus à gauche) 25 février 1995, Landsat 5 (path / row 126 / 52) (ci dessus à droite) 14 janvier 2009 Landsat 5 (path / row 126 / 52) La zone près de Phnom Penh, Cambodge, avant et après une inondation importante. 25 février 1995 et 14 janvier 2009. Landsat 5 (path / row 126 / 52). Images: Institut d'études géologiques des États-Unis

(ci dessus à gauche) 10 mars 2003 (ci dessus à droite) 18 décembre 2006 Dommages d’un village à l’est de Shangil Tobay, Darfour Nord, Soudan. 10 mars 2003 et 18 décembre 2006. Image: © DigitalGlobe, Inc. Original source: AAAS, High-Resolution Satellite Imagery and the Conflict in Chad and Sudan, http://www.aaas.org/ZzU

!35

Driven to extraction Forensic Architecture, ed., Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2014. 744 pp., £22.00 pb., 978 3 95679 011 9. The US military has become so adept at gathering data that it is now, according to an article in the November 2014 edition of National Defense Magazine, ‘drowning’ in its own digital morass. The promised bailout comes in the form of so-called ‘computer vision’ technologies that relieve human operatives from having to process visual information by eye. Instead of rooms full of people cleaning up fuzzy images frame by frame, new software is able to sharpen video in real time. With so much imagery, claims Sean Varah, CEO of Silicon Valley-based video analytics company MotionDSP, ‘you have to use computer vision technology to extract information.’ The automation of image analysis clearly raises a number of troubling issues regarding the substitution of human interpretive capacity with algorithms, but the broader assumption grounding Varah’s efficiency claims is that images are data reservoirs from which stuﬀ can be extracted – literally, drawn out. Whether or not people or machines are doing the extracting, the hinge here, it seems to me, is the question of what it means to be drawn out. Is information dragged out of data, like a body from a swamp hoisted into visibility by the hook of the penetrating gaze, human or otherwise? Or is it produced – drawn out, drafted – through the act of capture and conversion into meaningful forms? The notion of writing with light gave photography its name, the shapes of things rendered by what Henry Fox Talbot called the pencil of nature. But do the forms need to precede the drawing? This is not posed as a philosophical query as such but as a question regarding the nature of evidence. Computer vision does not fix a blurred image but makes a clear one out of blurred data – blurred in the sense of there being not enough received data to make a clear image without adjustment. The object is not the issue; the form of the image is what matters. While this is patently disturbing if we subscribe to the notion that evidence is made up of the unadulterated facts of the matter, the question remains as to whether the room full of human analysts is any less engaged in the construction – as opposed to the discovery – of information than the computer program. Computer vision, we might say, is simply quicker on the draw.

Varah is clearly not troubled by any semantic slippage in his use of the term ‘extraction’ and simply means to say that technology can meet the objective better and faster than its human equivalent. He certainly does not intend to suggest that evidence is made rather than found. Yet it is precisely in the making, the drawing or marking out of evidence, and in the capacity of technology to render making as finding, that the visual presents itself as a vital space of opportunity for Silicon Valley and military R&D. The real-time production of information through computer vision is a means of manufacturing a pristine image realm within which the referent is no more than the sludge left over from a dematerialized high-def picture process. Computer vision promises the fulfilment of the dream of information as commodity-form, the labour and struggle of interpretation zapped to oblivion by massive processing power, where the image is always already its own interpretation, rinsed of conflict or challenge that might inhibit its endless circulation as self-evidence. An achieved computer vision-enabled utopia would have no need for a public forum for debate and negotiated truth-finding since data and truth would be coterminous. Until then, there is enough blur in the images to require critical forensic examination. ‘States and corporations’, Eyal Weizman writes in the introduction to the dauntingly data-heavy collection Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, ‘can mobilize large resources to construct their claims. But the nature of struggles for justice is that they must run counter to dominant and dominating narratives.’ In order to challenge as lies the ‘well-constructed facts’ of technocrats in the employ of rich states and corporations, the technologies of surveillance and intelligence-gathering must be ‘mobilized in order to engage with struggles for justice, systemic violence, and environmental transformations across the frontiers of contemporary conflict.’ Hence the dual valence of the term forensic as pertaining to the public forum and to the crime scene. The book, published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, presents the work of the architects, artists, filmmakers, lawyers, and theorists directly involved in or otherwise associated with the Forensic Architecture project in the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London. It gathers forensic investigations undertaken by the project and its collaborators, research and essays that situate contemporary forensic practices within broader political, historical and aesthetic discourse. Case

r a d i c a l p h i l o s o p h y 1 9 0 (m a r /a p r 2 0 1 5 )

studies include citizen-video analysis of the shooting of Palestinian demonstrators by non-lethal munitions on the West Bank; an investigation of death camp sites in the former Yugoslavia; an inquiry into the use of white phosphorous munitions in Falluja and Gaza; an examination of covert drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Gaza; an interrogation of environmental violence and genocide in Guatemala during the early 1980s; and a forensic oceanographic study of the so-called ‘left-to-die’ boat carrying migrants fleeing Tripoli in 2011. In each case the investigation necessitates the production and analysis of mountains of, among other data, maps, charts, diagrams, infographics, screengrabs, satellite images, architectural drawings and numerous forms of photographic evidence. Faced with the apparent seamlessness of state and corporate ‘well-constructed lies’, the major challenge for these forms of counter-hegemonic forensic research is to locate moments of ambiguity in the evidence, the ostensibly irrelevant or irritable noise in the signal. It is precisely in what Weizman calls the ‘weak signals, often at the threshold of visibility’ – the blur that computer vision and other corporate techno-fixes would erase at source – that activists must pursue the ‘fragility’ of their truth claims ‘against the flood of obfuscating messages, of dominant narratives, fabricated noise, and attempts

at denial’. The investigations often turn on a crack in a building, a faint line in a single video frame, a few scattered pixels, a fugitive blur. For Weizman, the proliferation of digital technologies has produced ‘new visibilities’ uncontained by corporate and state machineries and new, accelerated modes of dissemination via phones, clouds and social networks. These technologies, he writes, have expanded the capacity to bear witness, but they have also transformed the meaning of testimony, and to a certain extent eroded its sanctity. Today there are many photographers and spectators but only a few witnesses in the traditional sense. While the number of images and available information in the public domain has been amplified, bringing new sights, sounds, and issues into the eyes and ears of an extended polity, these images also call for new practices of trawling through, looking at, and looking again, interpreting, verifying, decoding and amplifying messages and broadcasting them further.

The result, as the work collected in Forensis shows, is a kind of counter-torrent of ‘other’ information extrapolated out of ‘material and media flotsam’. Nothing is irrelevant; every hair, flake, particle and pixel is mobilized as the unruly excess of science, gathered to leverage its ‘aesthetic power’ to refute ‘state-sponsored mechanisms of denial, obfuscation,

r a d i c a l p h i l o s o p h y 1 9 0 (m a r /a p r 2 0 1 5 )

and manipulation that were established by those that control not only the depth of space, but also its interpretation’. It is the emphasis here on the aesthetic power of the critical forensic project that distinguishes it from ‘peer-reviewed science’ with its superior firepower and arsenal of ‘hard evidence’. In this asymmetrical struggle, connecting aesthetic practice, activism and science is intended to open up pockets for public debate in fields otherwise dominated by state- and corporate-funded experts. Here, the making of truth – as opposed to objectively locating it – is acknowledged at the outset as an intrinsic part of any investigation rather than something to be denied or erased. Truth, for the critical forensic investigator, is multiply performed, staged, constructed, pieced together, shaped, narrated and dramatized. Sensitivity to form – forms of matter, representation, dissemination – reflexively includes the process of truth-making as part of the project. Furthermore, matter itself is grasped in its sensorial capacity, able to ‘detect, register, and respond not only to contact

and impact, but to influences in its environment and to remote presence’. This is where architecture is positioned as the ‘kernel’ of the multidisciplinary field that Forensis elaborates, since for Weizman it is the building surveyor who properly understands that a building is responsive to all manner of external influences; architecture, then, is ‘aestheticized to its environment’. The job of forensic aesthetics thus becomes a process of bringing matter to the forum through various modes of prosopopeia – giving form to the language of things. If this sounds much like the way conventional forensic evidence might be used in court – letting the evidence speak – the key diﬀerence lies in a commitment to aesthetic modes of apprehension; to ambiguity, excess, performativity and theatricality. The non-conclusive, improvised, transformative energies of data are conceived not as a resource to be mined but as a medium through which new modes of understanding might be created.

John Beck

Fun and games Richard Barbrook, Class Wargames: Ludic Subversion against Spectacular Capitalism, Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe, New York and Port Watson, 2014. 444 pp., £25.00 pb., 978 1 57027 293 6. In 1965, Guy Debord of the Situationist International patented a tabletop wargame, The Game of War, which he had invented ten years previously. Just over a decade later, he went into partnership with his friend, the film producer and radical publisher Gérard Lebovici, to produce this and other wargames commercially. Another decade on, and after Lebovici’s assassination, their company finally published Debord’s game and its accompanying handbook. In 1991, three years before his own suicide, Debord demanded that all of his books, including The Game of War, be withdrawn from publication and pulped. For many critics, Debord’s turn to boardgaming during the self-imposed isolation of the later years of his life has remained a biographical oddity, even an embarrassment in relation to his fierce theoretical output from the 1950s to the 1970s. More recently, other critics have allowed The Game of War a place in a narrative of Debord’s life’s work, normally as part of his late emphasis on strategy and the theory of warfare. The game and its handbook were republished in French in 2006 and in English in 2008;

around the same time, Alexander Galloway and the Radical Software Group reinterpreted the game for the digital age – their version is available online. Debord seems to have anticipated the multivalence of his game, its richness for biographical speculation as well as theoretical inquiry. ‘The surprises vouchsafed by this Kriegspiel [sic] of mine seem endless’, he writes in his autobiographical Panegyric (1989); ‘I rather fear it may turn out to be the only one of my works to which people will venture to accord any value.’ Class Wargames: Ludic Subversion against Spectacular Capitalism documents the eﬀorts of Richard Barbrook and the Class Wargames group to play, share and discuss Debord’s game. The group plays other wargames, but focuses on Debord’s version, of which they have made a short film and a reproduction of the modernist board and pieces manufactured for Debord. Since 2007, the group has played the game at exhibitions and conferences around the world; reports from these matches serve as the primary structuring device of Class Wargames. Importantly, the function, lesson or significance of the game is

r a d i c a l p h i l o s o p h y 1 9 0 (m a r /a p r 2 0 1 5 )

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2015, volume 33, pages 382 – 388

doi:10.1068/d3302rev

Review essay. Empire on trial: the forensic appearance of truth † “ Truth not only exists; it appears.”

Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds

The publication of Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth marks a formidable intellectual and political intervention in the analysis of the ways in which traces of destruction and violence are built into the geographies of our imperial present. The book is a collective effort of staggering scope, depth, and ambition that has one clear goal: to level a forensic gaze on state and corporate crimes. This is a gaze finely attuned to the negativity of matter, sensitive to the many ways in which rubble, buildings, scars, chemicals, bones, sounds, algorithms, videos, or photographs can become the evidence of crimes committed by the powerful forces that continuously ravage the world. This extraordinary volume is the collective work of Forensic Architecture, an interdisciplinary team based at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London, which since 2011 has been engaged in collaborative work with partner organizations and activists from all over the world. The intellectual leader of this international effort is the noted architect and activist Eyal Weizman, the author of the widely acclaimed books Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (2007) and The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (2012). Forensis draws from Weizman’s previous work on many levels, particularly in its emphasis on the materiality of violence and domination and the political power of an architectural, spatial, and forensic lens. In Hollow Land Weizman demonstrated how the Israeli state controls Palestinians through the manipulation of the materiality and architectural forms of the terrain (walls, checkpoints, roads, tunnels) and the control of vertical fields of vision (through hilltops, drones, and satellites). The Least of All Possible Evils, in turn, examined the logic of ‘the lesser evil’ used by imperial actors to justify their allegedly humanitarian violence; it also dissects the evidence that reveals the terrorist nature of this violence, such as the rubble and corpses created by Israel in Gaza. Forensis develops this sensibility in much further depth, and captures an outstanding diversity of traces of destruction from the world over; in doing so, it not only reveals the evidence of state and capitalist crimes but also proposes a novel political and conceptual sensibility. This is a disposition that resonates with what I have called—on the basis of my own ethnographic study of rubble—an object-oriented negativity: that is, a gaze oriented toward objects marked by traces of rupture and dislocation (Gordillo, 2014). Forensic investigations have recently gained enormous appeal in popular culture through TV shows like CSI. But this is a forensic gaze that seeks to solve only crimes recognized as such by the state, thereby celebrating state power and its apparatuses of surveillance. Weizman and his colleagues, in contrast, propose to reverse the forensic gaze and turn it into “a counter-hegemonic practice able to invert the relation between individuals and states, to challenge and resist state and corporate violence and the tyranny of their truth” (page 11). Forensis reveals that this tyranny is built on “well-constructed lies” (page 29) and draws on a ‘forensic architecture’ to expose them, understanding architecture not in a narrow disciplinary sense but as a ‘mode of interpretation’ sensitive, as Weizman puts it, to “the ever-changing relations between people and things, mediated by spaces and structures across multiple scales” (page 13). † A review of Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth by Forensic Architecture, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2014, 744 pages, £22.00 paper, ISBN 3956790111

Review essay

383

This volume brings together an innovative collective of talented scholars, artists, theorists, activists, and partner organizations analyzing evidence of imperial crimes on all continents and in all sorts of terrains, including the ocean, the sky, and the underground. The book’s chapters take the reader on a gripping journey to a global constellation of traces of dislocation, from Guatemala to Pakistan, from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Arctic to sub-Saharan Africa (among many other places). The richness of the material is clear in the volume’s 760 pages, forty-eight contributors (including individuals and organizations), and hundreds of photographs, maps, charts, and computer-generated models. Given the book’s scope and the consistently high quality of all chapters—a notable feat for a volume of this size—no review can do justice to the sophistication and detail of the ideas articulated by its contributors. My aim, in this regard, is to reflect on some of the most important theoretical, methodological, and political threads running through Forensis, in order to evaluate the promises and challenges of a forensic gaze devoted to exposing the fraught materiality of the global order. What sets this forensic lens apart from state-run forensics its not only its more radical negativity but also its goal to recover the original meaning of the Latin word forensis, ‘pertaining to the forum’. As Weizman argues in the introduction, Forensis interrogates the relationship between the fields where the evidence is collected—actual geographies that he views as elastic and contested force fields—and the forum as the space “where the results of an investigation are presented and contested” (page 9). This forum is a dynamic triangulation between the contested object (the trace of violence and destruction), the forensic interpreter, and “the assembly of a public gathering”. More crucially, this triangulation is not limited to legal courts. Forensis does, indeed, cover evidence that Forensic Architecture has presented in court, for instance in the genocide trial of the Guatemalan general Ríos-Montt (Case: Guatemala) and in the petition submitted to Israel’s High Court to ban the use of white phosphorous in urban environments by the Israel military (Case: White Phosphorous). Yet the book’s contributors are keenly aware that political struggles are not decided in legal battles, where the global elites have the upper hand. Forensis is primarily a political, rather than legalistic, intervention that seeks to empower global struggles against those crimes that states and corporations refuse to name as such, from targeted assassinations by drones to the environmental dislocation created by the fossil-fuel industries and climate change. The majority of the crimes documented in Forensis respond, directly or indirectly, to the capitalist system of globalized sovereignty that dominates the world as a whole, and that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) have called ‘Empire’. This is why I interpret these crimes as imperial in nature—even if the contributors to Forensis do not necessarily use this concept. Hardt and Negri have been criticized for presenting Empire as a disembodied, totalizing abstraction and for giving the misleading impression that the globe has been politically homogenized by transnational flows. But the existence of a multicentered and planetary Empire does not contradict that this globalized formation creates localized and extremely diverse patterns of destruction, often shaped by the affective fields of particular nation-states. Most of the crimes covered in Forensis—from the killing of civilians in Yemen to the impact of climate change—involve states and corporations defending the imperial hierarchies of the global order. And these actors are permanently surveilling the totality of the planet with multiple technologies in search of signs of resistance and antisystemic disruption. And this is where Forensis’s brilliance lies: in reversing the direction of the inquisitive gaze to expose the overwhelming evidence of the destructive nature of this globalized system of sovereignty. In doing so, the book puts Empire on trial in the political forum of world public opinion.

384

Review essay

The multiplicity of objects and technologies analyzed in Forensis is simply outstanding. The contributors examine evidence made up of extremely diverse materialities: human remains (chapters by Keenan, Sheikh, Pereira); buildings, rubble, and ruins (chapters by Weiss, Littell, Türekten, Cuellar, and Dische-Becker and Ashkar; interview with Jan van Pelt; Case: Living Death Camps); images congealed in photos and videos (Case: Bil’in; Case: White Phosphorous; chapters by Kazan, Schuppli, Heller, Amir); the sound of tape-recorded interrogations, the sound waves used to map the underground, or the soundscapes created by drones (chapters by Hamdan, Bishop; chapter “Uneasy Listening” by Schuppli); toxics embedded in human bodies (chapters by Türekten, Pereira, Caygill, Ahmed); toxics spread in the ocean and rivers (chapters by Tavares, Ahmed); satellite imagery of destroyed villages, polluted rivers, degraded forests, or NATO ships (chapters by Weizman and Weizman, Pereira; Case: Guatemala; Case: Left-todie Boat); local perceptions about the impact of climate change (chapter “Can the Sun Lie? ” by Schuppli; chapter by Modelling Kivalina); the hyperfast algorithms generated by financial institutions and responsible for market crashes (chapter by Nestler), or the distress calls made by African migrants on a boat drifting in the Mediterranean and left to die by NATO forces (chapter by Heller and Pezzani). Many of these forensic traces are so faint, elusive, and microscopic that their detection by Forensic Architecture and their partner organizations required both a nuanced human gaze and sophisticated bundles of technologies and sciences: DNA analysis, ground-penetrating radars, sound-wave sensors, satellite imagery, microbiology, mineralogy, toxicology, computer modeling, or the georeferencing of cell-phone calls captured by satellites—which were all used following the forensic principle that “every contact leaves a trace” (Locard, cited in chapter by Lahoud, page 508). But since many traces of physical contact can be faint, detecting them requires what Weizman calls a sensibility for “weak sensors” that are “suggestive rather than conclusive” (page 29). These weak sensors—for instance the blurred video image of an Israeli soldier shooting a tear gas canister with the intention to hit and kill an unarmed Palestinian protestor—can nonetheless become politically powerful ‘modes of capture’. This is the capture of an element of the truth congealed in the trace: the evidence that a crime has been committed. An important concept articulated by Weizman in his introduction to Part II (Secrets) is that of ‘threshold of detectability’. Many traces of violence are hard to detect not only because of their small size but also because the technologies that can capture and recognize their existence may keep those traces from reaching this threshold. Detectability therefore involves two sets of materialities, that of the evidence itself and also “the physicality of the media by which it was captured” (page 365). A fascinating example involves the traces of US drone strikes in tribal areas of Pakistan where the work of journalists is extremely difficult (a topic also covered in the chapters by Woods and Burns). Activists seeking to document drone strikes, therefore, can often count only on satellite imagery of targeted areas. The hellfire missiles launched from drones into buildings, however, are designed to explode not on contact with the roof but immediately after piercing through it, so that the blast kills anyone inside but leaves the roof largely intact, except for the hole left by the missile passing through. This hole is usually smaller than 50 cm2. This size is forensically and politically significant because it is below the threshold of detectability of publicly available satellite images. 50 cm2 is the size of a single pixel in the resolution to which these images, following a security rationale, are degraded by the United States in order to camouflage its military actions. Therefore, a hole in the roof is turned into an invisible presence, for it “might appear as nothing more than a slight color variation, a single darker pixel perhaps, in the pixel composition of the image” (Introduction, Part II: Matter against Memory, by Weizman, pages 371–372; see also Case: Drone Strikes).

Review essay

385

Those practicing a critical forensics of drone strikes, in short, are able to see less than the perpetrators of a crime and seek to pierce through these intentionally created patterns of opacity. One of the principles of state-run forensics, as Weizman argues, is that a crime’s investigator should be able “to see more, using better optics or a better resolution, than the perpetrators of that crime. … In our case, however, it is the state agencies that do the killings and independent organizations the forensics” (page 372). This induced opacity opens up ‘the space of denial’ through which imperial forces can silence their crimes. And this is why the members of Forensic Architecture working on drone strikes also draw on witness testimonies and other techniques and technologies of interpretation. By drawing from witnesses, locally produced footage, and computer-generated models of targeted buildings, activists and forensic architects were often able to amass the evidence that revealed a truth: that unarmed civilians were killed in a strike by US drones. This takes us to a conceptual core of this volume: its unapologetic commitment to a materialist idea of truth, clear in the subtitle: The Architecture of Public Truth. This is not the positivist truth represented on CSI, where know-it-all forensic geeks always and transparently solve the crime. Forensis reveals that traces of violence and destruction are often disjointed, blurred, and microscopic. Their interpretation, therefore, is often inconclusive. As Weizman argues, “material forms … can only reflect truth in fragments and ruins, and suggest uncertain, discontinuous, and lacunar interpretations.” Yet Forensis, at the same time, rejects the antiuniversalism of those who downplay truth as something “relative, multiple, or nonexistent”. Instead, Weizman proposes to view truth “as a common project under continuous construction” (page 29). Yet I believe that Forensis’s approach to truth is, in fact, more radical than the idea that truth is constructed. After all, if truth is constructed, it can be argued that different actors construct it differently, and this may open the door back to the relativism that the book rightly disputes. The problem of truth is certainly complex and politically charged. But Alain Badiou may help us read Forensis from a new angle, for he is the most important continental philosopher committed to a revitalized and political approach to truth: that is, a truth that subverts the lies of states and corporations. In Logics of Worlds Badiou (2009) proposes to conceive of truth from a distinctly immanent ontology, one based not on the ‘being’ of truth but on its appearing. Badiou argues that there are four truthful realms of human action: love, art, science, and politics. These truths do not simply ‘exist’ but appear as part of truth-procedures marked by events. The truth of the love shared by a couple, for instance, appears for Badiou in the event of their amorous encounter, the same way that the political truth that human beings are born equal appears in the event of revolutions. In our case, the truth revealed by a forensic gaze is not simply ‘there’ but appears through a careful examination of the evidence. In one of the most important chapters in Forensis, Thomas Keenan gets close to articulating this idea when he argues that evidence is “a matter of appearance, of sight, of what manifests itself in the realm of visibility” (page 48, my emphasis). This appearance of evidence that is also the appearance of truth is the result of the combination of what Badiou views as two fundamental truth procedures: science as a mathematical bundle of technologies of sensory and geometrical capture and politics as rupture with what is. In Forensis science and politics come together through what can be seen (to draw again on Badiou) as the contributors’ fidelity to the victims of the violence and destruction that created the trace as evidence. The truth that appears through the often-gripping pages of Forensis is that of a vast state– corporate machinery unleashing social and environmental destruction in the name of profits, the state, and civilization: the truth released by the mass graves and degraded forests created by state terrorism in the Guatemalan highlands in the early 1980s; the truth of the poisoned rivers, oceans, and land ravaged by mining and oil operations in Chile, the United States,

386

Review essay

or West Papua; the truth of the bodies of rescue workers sickened and killed by the toxic debris of the World Trade Center in New York; the truth that the 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen was a ‘crime scene’ where wealthy nations—in agreeing to an ‘acceptable’ global average of a two-degree increase in temperatures—sentenced sub-Saharan Africa to a future of devastating droughts. These multiple truths, indeed, often emerge in fragments and in blurred patterns of evidence; but this evidence reveals that damage, death, and destruction have occurred and will continue occurring—unless they are stopped by collective actions. Unlike the transcendental Truth advocated by states or religions, the truths documented in Forensis emerge from disruptive patterns of multiplicity that problematize the univocal ways in which some forensics or victims may interpret what those truths may mean in the first place. The chapter by Shela Sheikh, for instance, examines the attempts to identify the remains of the thousands of people massacred by the Bosnian Serb army in Srebrenica in 1995. As elsewhere in the world, relatives of the victims were very keen to identify the remains. But drawing on the work of the Grupa Spomenik collective, Sheikh examines how DNA technologies may contribute to reproducing the identity politics of the perpetrators (and of genocide) by labeling the victims ‘Muslims’, a label that many victims did not identify with (page 173). Sheikh shows that a critical forensics should avoid projecting a bounded identity onto the evidence and, instead, extract truth from its disjointed, opaque multiplicity. Human remains, in this regard, are the evidence of a crime but also “an excessive and stubborn remainder” that bears “the potential to resist identification, quantification, burial, and sacralization” (page 179). This elusiveness makes another truth appear: what Badiou (2009) calls ‘the pure multiplicity of being’, the unclassifiable multiplicity of human beings that, in the Balkans, was erased by an essentialist identity politics that turned it into one killable entity: ‘Muslims’. This example takes us to another point that to me is theoretically and politically crucial, but that Forensis does not articulate explicitly: that the forensic appearance of political truth shatters the trace as fetish. In the introduction, paradoxically, Weizman seems to argue the opposite when (drawing from Arjun Appadurai) he writes that a critical forensics should embrace a ‘methodological fetishism’. In his words, “If fetishism is the attribution of an inherent power and a certain agency to inanimate objects, then we must embrace the term as we come to understand objects, buldings, cracks, and their representations as historical agents” (page 19). Weizman clarifies that he does not view the fetish as “a mystifying and obsfuscating veil” but as the “entrypoint” to reconstruct larger forces (pages 18–19). Objects, indeed, should not be reduced to dead, passive matter devoid of affective power. However, treating them as fetishes with agency seems to contradict what Forensis does best: to undermine the fetishization of objects. Isn’t the revelation of the processes that create objects (be they commodities or traces) the basis of what Marx saw as the critique of fetishism? The fact that an incomplete trace can help us understand the actions that created it, in fact reveals that the generative ‘agency’ that the forensic gaze seeks to capture is that of those forces that coalesced in the trace. Several case studies in Forensis confirm that the fetishization of rubble or places cuts them off from the processes that created them or the people who inhabit them—and in doing so serves the interest of the powerful. This is, incidentally, a major point I make in Rubble (Gordillo, 2014). In Forensis cases in point are the rubble of houses from the Palestinian village of Jaffa that Israeli architects turned into a Zionist memorial that erases the prior Palestinian presence (chapter by Cuellar) and the project in Belgrade to evict people who have been living in a former death camp for six decades in order to create a memorial (Case: Living Death Camp). The examples confirm that a critical forensic work is hostile to the transformation of matter charged with negativity into an object-fetish, for in the case

Review essay

387

of Belgrade “a holocaust memorial cannot be built on a forcefully cleared ground without immediately compromising its purpose” (page 194). In The Least of All Possible Evils, in fact, Weizman provided a compelling example of this antifetishistic disposition involving the rubble created by Israel in Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009. He shows that the forensic architects sent to Gaza by the UN to assess the destruction were often accused of ‘ruin fetishism’ because of their detailed, careful observation of the ruins created by Israeli violence. Yet Weizman’s analysis shows that the opposite was the case. The forensics defetishized the ruins because they examined their forms not for the forms’ sake, but to deduce the type of violence that created them. The ‘pancake form’ of some ruins, for instance, revealed to them that Israeli military engineers had destroyed the building by putting explosives in internal columns. Once the columns collapse, “the floor slabs come down on top of each other like a pancake” (Weizman, 2012, page 120). The ruins created by Israeli armored bulldozers, in contrast, looked like “pyramids or collapsed houses of cards”, with the edges destroyed and “the central pillars left standing” (page 119). The forensic team concluded that most of the ruins of Gaza had pyramidal shapes. This was the geometrical evidence that the rubble had been largely produced by Israeli bulldozers to “shape the battle space” and facilitate a safer movement of troops, which under international law is a war crime (page 124). Weizman cited Hito Steyerl, who wrote, inspired by Walter Benjamin, “The thing is never just an object, but a fossil in which a constellation of forces are petrified” (in Weizman, 2012, page 111). Forensis is such an illuminating, persuasive, and important book precisely because of its revelation of the constellations of forces petrified in objects all over the world. Its materialism is not just that of objects as traces but also that of dynamic forces, pressures, and what Weizman calls ‘field-causalities’. And this materiality has an undercurrent of affective dimensions, which are apparent in Weizman’s evocative closing of his introduction. There, he writes that being sensitive to the materiality of politics entails a predisposition to be affected by the evidence, for “to detect is to transform, and to be transformed is to feel pain” (page 30, my emphasis). This relationship between forensic detection, transformation, and the experience of feeling pain hints at something politically vital, which Forensis could have perhaps explored in more detail: that revealing the evidence that a crime has been committed is never enough to induce change. Since ‘the forum’ is by definition a field of confrontation, the evidence may be solid but insufficient to make others feel pain and act collectively. In his chapter on evidence, Keenan articulates this problem when he challenges the commonsense idea that “the evidence speaks for itself”. The evidence, he argues, “never seems to speak for itself, at least not loudly enough”, for it “needs to be shown, demonstrated, stated, claimed, proved … made evident to others” (page 42). Evidence, more importantly, is “what is used to persuade”. It is not a matter of fact, but “that upon which a decision can be rendered about what the facts in this case are”. This means that evidence “is not an answer, but a question: it asks for a decision, for a reading or an interpretation” (page 45). The fact that the evidence needs to be “made evident to others” poses the most fundamental political question that permeates Forensis: how to use the evidence of imperial crimes to persuade those who are inclined to disregard it. After all, isn’t the evidence of humangenerated climate change already indisputable? Isn’t the evidence of atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza in the summer of 2014 equally clear in the over 2000 corpses and huge piles of rubble produced by its indiscriminate violence? The powerful actors that rule and ravage the world will always disregard the evidence of their crimes; and when confronted with it, they will relentlessly seek to discredit it and destroy it. This is the disregard for suffering that Ann Stoler (2009) has aptly called an imperial disposition: an inability to be moved, or to be moved deeply enough, by the suffering of those deemed dangerous, unworthy,

388

Review essay

and disposable. Yet politics happens also because the hegemonic naturalization of this disregard can be challenged and eroded. In many circumstances, the evidence is exposed in such a way that it does have the power to induce empathy and critical collective action. Forensis is a groundbreaking book precisely because it draws from and, crucially, moves past the examination of evidence of destruction from all over the planet to pursue a more challenging, urgent task: to persuade the forum that Empire is guilty of crimes against humanity and life on Earth. GastĂłn Gordillo Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada References Badiou A, 2009 Logics of Worlds translated by A Toscano (Continuum, New York) Gordillo G, 2014 Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (Duke University Press, Durham, NC) Hardt M, Negri A, 2000 Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA) Stoler A, 2009 Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ) Weizman E, 2007 Hollow Land: Israelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Architecture of Occupation (Verso, London) Weizman E, 2012 The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (Verso, London)