In recent years, a little-known research group named Forensic
Architecture began using novel research methods to undertake a series
of investigations into human rights abuses. Today, the group provides
crucial evidence for international courts and works with a wide range
of activist groups, NGOs, Amnesty International, and the UN. Beyond
shedding new light on human rights violations and state crimes across
the globe, Forensic Architecture has also created a new form of
investigative practice that bears its name. The group uses
architecture as an optical device to investigate armed conflicts and
environmental destruction, as well as to cross-reference a variety of
evidence sources, such as new media, remote sensing, material
analysis, witness testimony, and crowd-sourcing. In Forensic
Architecture, Eyal Weizman, the group’s founder, provides, for the
first time, an in-depth introduction to the history, practice,
assumptions, potentials, and double binds of this practice. The book
includes an extensive array of images, maps, and detailed
documentation that records the intricate work the group has performed.
Included in this volume are case studies that traverse multiple scales
and durations, ranging from the analysis of the shrapnel fragments in
a room struck by drones in Pakistan, the reconstruction of a contested
shooting in the West Bank, the architectural recreation of a secret
Syrian detention center from the memory of its survivors, a
blow-by-blow account of a day-long battle in Gaza, and an
investigation of environmental violence and climate change in the
Guatemalan highlands and elsewhere. Weizman’s Forensic Architecture,
stunning and shocking in its critical narrative, powerful images, and
daring investigations, presents a new form of public truth,
technologically, architecturally, and aesthetically produced. Their
practice calls for a transformative politics in which architecture as
a field of knowledge and a mode of interpretation exposes and
confronts ever-new forms of state violence and secrecy.
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Violence at the Threshold of Detectability
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781935408178
Publisert
2021
Utgiver
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter