Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy

Matters of Calculation: The Evidence of the Anthropocene

Heather Davis & Etienne Turpin Perhaps a good place to begin is with your agile reading of the sequence of disasters that constitute the itinerary of Voltaire’s Candide (1759). From our position in the humanities, we know that the epoch of the European Enlightenment was not universally celebrated; in fact, Voltaire’s ridicule of Liebniz’s theological optimism—wherein the best of all possible worlds was guaranteed by a divine calculus that permitted forms of destructive evil in order to optimize the invisible and mysterious good occurring elsewhere—is a key to understanding the violence of this period. Although less subject to ridicule, but certainly no less pernicious, is the contemporary condition wherein the optimal forms of destruction called for by new standards of international humanitarian law shield criminal perpetrators whose precise violence increases alongside the suffering of those oppressed by calculated violence, coercion, and collective punishments. What led you to return to Voltaire’s critique of Leibniz? And how does this metaphysical disposition persist in what you call the “humanitarian present”?

Eyal Weizman It might be interesting to start this conversation with a little thought experiment. How would we, if we could, intervene in the “debate” between Leibniz, Rousseau, and Voltaire, about the meaning of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake (which is alluded to in the best-known part of Candide) from the point of view of the Anthropocene? Leibniz’s theodicy was of course used (he was already dead when the earthquake struck) to explain this disaster as the result of a divine calculus that forever generates an optimal/optimist “best of all possible worlds.” Voltaire mocked him and this concept, arguing instead that natural phenomena—which are never benign—could be better explained by rational science. Writing in a rather cheeky tone in reaction to Voltaire’s response to his poem on Lisbon, the young Rousseau came to the defense of nature, using the earthquake to rehearse his argument against cities—he particularly faulted Lisbon’s density—as part of his quest for a “return to nature.” So, if we were to intervene rather gently in the controversy, we could start by giving some support to Rousseau: we know now that after the earthquake a tidal wave was created that broke through the embankments that fortified, and therefore made less porous, the edges of the Rio Tejo. It is this aspect of the earthquake that brought devastation to the dense dockyards and buildings that had proliferated in direct proportion to increased colonial wars and trade based in the port. When these waterways and buildings collapsed, fire broke out in several districts, multiplying the death toll. However, rather than aggravating the divide between a corrupt humanity and a benevolent nature, as Rousseau tried to do, we can see the Lisbon event as perhaps the first message from the Anthropocene, occurring, in fact, a quarter century before Paul Crutzen’s date of origin.[3] In this conception, human action and what insurance companies still call “acts of god” are entangled on a planetary-scale construction site.

But we could also intervene in qualified support for Leibniz. Yes, our world is also described and thought to be controlled by an endless calculus, but this calculation is not undertaken by God alone; rather, it is aided by an increasingly complex bureaucracy of calculations that include sensors in the subsoil, terrain, air, and sea, all processed by algorithms and their attendant models. This reality might necessitate a different ethico-political response, as well as a different conception of universality not built on leveling the difference between cultures and people, but one that would also include the ocean. And, just to follow the circuit of polite discussions—we are among the pantheon of the Enlightenment after all—we could say something in support of Voltaire. Don’t forget that, as a repost to Pangloss’s Leibnizian mantra of all the best in the best of all possible worlds, Voltaire concluded Candide with “we must cultivate our garden.” Now the garden is the size of the planet.

So, to answer your question more seriously now, what led me to return to Voltaire, and Lisbon, is the relation between calculus and disaster. It is a relation of crisis that we can see in so many fields now, from a humanitarianism that seeks to calculate the least of all possible evils (as war-making is reduced to acting on calculations of immanent risk) to financial speculation. In these fields and many others, instruments designed to reduce risk—derivatives, targeted killings, humanitarian aid—end up amplifying it exponentially.

HD&ET How has your thinking and approach to the neocolonial occupation of Palestine by Israel changed over time? We are particularly interested in the movement of your thought from Hollow Land (2007) and its elaboration of “political plastic” to your more recent development of forensic architecture in The Least of All Possible Evils (2011), Forensic Architecture (2012), and Mengele’s Skull (2012), where the subject as witness is being replaced and surpassed by an emergent forensic sensibility, an object-oriented juridical culture. How much of this movement is influenced by the changing situation itself?

EW I think the latter works are to a certain extent a set of methodological reflections on Hollow Land. I had to find the language to understand—and it took some time and effort—in what ways materiality and territoriality participate in shaping conflict, rather than simply being shaped by it. Hollow Land was already structured around various material things at different scales, so the logic of a kind of forensic investigation was already present there. I guess I was personally attracted to the investigative intensity in forensics, less to the legal context in which its findings are presented, which are oftentimes quite skewed, especially in an international legal context, as I showed in the latest books. As well, the shift from Hollow Land to The Least of All Possible Evils also marks a shift in my attention from the West Bank to Gaza. This has obviously been shaped by events. In Gaza, one can notice a system of rule based on humanitarian violence, a form of control that operates through the calculation and modulation of life-sustaining supplies, the application of standards of the humanitarian minimum, and the seeming conduct of war by human rights (HR) and international humanitarian law (IHL) principles. So some of my attention shifted from the mechanisms of territorial control to “humanitarian” government. Although, of course, materiality is a fundamental category in the latter book, albeit in a different way, as I tried to show how it activates law and its forums through forensics.

In any case, the investigation that culminated in my recent work started with a certain refusal of spatial research methodologies, commonly held at the time, derived mainly from certain readings of Henri Lefebvre. I thought they needed a more dynamic, elastic, topological, and force-field-oriented understanding of space, as well as an understanding of the immanent power of constant interaction between force and form. Across what I describe as the “political plastic,” space is continuously in transformation—political forces slowing into form. I tried to describe war as a dynamic process of space-making. Frontier colonization is a slowed-down war, but still very elastic; the frontier is very different from a city like Paris, which has figured as the imaginary for a lot of spatial theory and thus often misplaced and applied to the frontier. Paris is a planned city, a very hard city, and its hardness has haunted the imagination of some spatial scholars studying very different realities today. I thought we had to get rid of Paris to liberate Palestine. And then I kept pushing toward the idea of immanent materiality on different scales; not only on the scale of the territory, but on a micro-scale, through an analysis of details and substances—water, fields, forests, hills, valleys—which all play a role in shaping conflicts, and therefore have an effect on the forensic imagination.

So, to refer to an idea you brought up in our earlier conversation, the idea of “elasticity,” or what you called “plasticity”—ending at a moment of a bomb blast—I would say that I think that a blast is simply an acceleration of relations of force and form in the same way that wars in the city are an actualization and acceleration of the latent and slower processes of conflict and negotiation that define urban life and every form of development in the city. I think it is more interesting to think of the continuities between elasticities and explosions than about the differences. I was working very closely with analysts of bomb blast sites, and you see millisecond by millisecond—there is a description of this in the last chapter of the Lesser Evil book—what happens to a building when it is bombed. It is like taking on 15 years of gradual disintegration, which is what every building is undergoing from the moment it is built, in 5 milliseconds.

HD&ET So what you have called “the pyramids of Gaza” are just the sped-up force of the “natural” collapse of a building?[4]

EW The destruction of refugee houses has generated the pyramids of Gaza. There are many pyramids throughout the strip, mainly in the camps and neighbourhoods that ring Gaza City and along the short border with Egypt. They are a new typology that has emerged out of the encounter between a three-storey residential building, of the kind that provides a home for refugees, and an armored Caterpillar D9 bulldozer. The short shovel of the bulldozer can destroy only the columns closer to the façade of the building, but the single centre column is left intact, and it makes the peak of the pyramid. The fact that the centre column remains is what makes this new type of ruin; it is important because one can actually enter the ruin itself—very carefully—as some forensic architects have done. There are irregularities that register differences in the process of construction, the uneven spread of concrete, or the various modes of destruction, such as the inability or reluctance of the bulldozer operator to go completely around the building. A particular irregularity could be the result of a previous firefight, for example. The task is obviously to connect the differences in the patterns of destruction of concrete to the general process of war—or in this case, an attack on Gaza—to connect the micro-details to a larger, systemic violence.

Here is another example where an analysis of the composition of building materials is crucial: geological formations exist both inside and outside buildings. They are obviously the ground on which buildings stand, but also appear in construction materials, as stones or the gravel within concrete. A denser concentration of minerals within a rock will often become the line of least resistance, along which a crack will tear it, and likewise the building, apart. So seismic cracks are interesting because they connect the geological, the urban, and the architectural. Cracks are a fantastic demonstration of a shared materiality of the planet, moving from geology to architecture, and studying cracks, which is one of the tasks of forensic architecture, demonstrates the necessity to rid our thinking of the figure-ground relation—a building is not ontologically or epistemologically different from the rock or gravel in which it is anchored.

For example, Dara Behrman, a member of the Centre for Research Architecture, looked at how pirate archaeological excavations—for a biblical history project undertaken directly beneath the Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan in occupied Jerusalem—generated cracks that travelled from bedrock formations through the voids of the underground archaeological sites, to roadwork and walls of buildings above. The cracks appear and disappear, translating force into lines of least resistance. Residents brought photos of these cracks to court, but their political and legal meaning, part of the underground colonization of Palestine, was not admitted. If Forensic Architecture refers to the presentation of structural analysis within contemporary legal and political forums, the task of this collection is to extend its scope beyond the context of property and insurance disputes to become an analytical frame and a new mode of practice, bearing upon different scales of investigation in engaging the material consequences of the most urgent political issues and contemporary struggles for justice.

HD&ET The material analyses of Forensic Architecture, such as those you mentioned, are always part of a multi-scalar, multi-centred approach. We believe that such an itinerant methodology differs from the dominant trajectory of Science and Technology Studies (STS), by its explicit relation to, or explication of, political realities. Of course, we do not mean to suggest here that scholarship in the field of science studies is not political, but instead that the work of Forensic Architecture, and more broadly, the work produced at the CRA, seems much more “interventionist,” if we might use this term. Does the intervention, or interference, in political realities shape the practice of Forensic Architecture? And, presuming it does somehow inform these practices, we are interested in how such interference helps to advance certain interdisciplinary strategies.

EW Yes, we see research as a form of political intervention. It is crucial for us to be actively involved in the processes that we write (or exhibit or film) about. This is for two reasons: first, because we engage in activist research and take sides; second, because being in close proximity—in fact, being part of the subject of our research—is the only way for us to undertake the research. Political and legal activism allows one to gain unparalleled access to institutions and thus enables epistemological inquiries as well. Forensics was not the first, nor is it the only research we conduct at the Centre, although it has become the most productive because it is precisely structured by the act of taking sides, without compromising the intensity and seriousness of the research. It created a productive bridge between research and intervention, or what we call field work and forum work.

We have recently started to refer to our practice as forensis, which is a Latin word that means “pertaining to the forum.” This is a more general term than forensic architecture: forensis is a new aesthetico-political condition in which research and science are employed in an activist mode as a part of a political struggle. We choose our cases to demonstrate both new methods of inquiry, and how the production of new forms of evidence can expand the political imagination and articulate new claims for justice in relation to violent conflict and climate change. But our research practice also involves raising critical questions about the role of new technologies of capture and representation in the creation and articulation of public truths.

So forensis departs from the methods of STS on account of the way in which political activism acts as the engine and the enabler of epistemological inquiry. In fact, we do two things that are both interdependent and contradictory. On the one hand, our members engage by practicing forensic architecture on different scales and locations, including concentration camps in former Yugoslavia, drone warfare sites in Pakistan, Yemen and Palestine, migrant movements in the Mediterranean, and environmental damage in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador, among other examples. Each of these investigations was chosen because of the urgency of the situation; however, each investigation also allows us to demonstrate how methodological innovations in the production of new types of evidence can intervene in the process. Our investigations, conducted with groups of political activists, prosecution teams, human rights organizations, and the United Nations, allow us to construct a critical epistemology that can theoretically evaluate the very assumptions, protocols, processes, and politics of knowledge production. In short, the research uses forensics both to pose political challenges and examine the tools of contemporary forensic practices.

The two modes of practice at the core of our research method—producing evidence and querying its nature—continuously pose a series of challenges that both strengthen and threaten its component parts. As we defend our findings as the truth of what has happened, our opponents could surely point to our writing on the elastic nature of truth-claims, the audacity of truth-speech, and the complexity of truth-making. And, when we are in more critical discussions, our colleagues can rightly point out that we were often in danger of becoming complicit with the very institutions and processes we have previously criticized. We see the tension between these component parts as the condition of our work. Rather than resolve these contradictions by pushing the pendulum one way or the other, we recognize the tension as productive. This is not a problem that could ever arrive at a satisfactory solution, but a mode of problematization that intensifies the research process.

As critical scholars and practitioners, we arrived at this project armed to the teeth with critique, but the only way for us to conduct meaningful research was in close proximity—in critical proximity—with the subjects of our investigation and with the empirical rigour that could only be generated through such proximity. “Critical” as a mode of practice requires a high level of self-reflexivity as we begin to inhabit the terrain of our own inquiries; but, for us, critical also means vital, urgent, and decisive.

There is another aspect. Because the CRA program is nested in the context of Goldsmiths, which is an especially multidisciplinary institution, it is also a pedagogical experiment that attempts to bring critical education together with activism using science and technology. So, another main difference with STS is that the original kernel of the multidisciplinary field for STS is anthropology or sociology of science; the kernel of our multidisciplinary field is architecture, and architecture with an activist core.

At the CRA, our research considers the role of spatial analysis and representation. Of course, when doing forensic architecture, the frame of architecture is used to refer to a more extensive set of relations and spatializations, including buildings, cities, oceans, and territories, because these fields describe the pathologies of our contemporary situation. Our scale of operation expands the frame of analysis and intervention from the house—such as when we do “building surveyor” work on houses in war zones—to the planet, through the work of some of our members, including Paulo Tavares, Nabil Ahmed, Godofredo Pereira, and Adrian Lahoud, who see the earth as both a construction site and a ruin.

Speaking about the whole earth—and I’m thinking here of the exhibition work of Anselm Franke—the starting point for our investigations was much more modest; it was inspired by the work of building surveyors, by their careful and systemic analysis of the structural and infrastructural conditions of a building.[5] The practice of Forensic Architecture starts with the presentation of such surveys in a legal forum. In relation to both war zones and the environment, surveys cannot always maintain a haptic dimension, but also rely on all sorts of sensing and measuring technologies. The single surveyor is replaced by an ad hoc network of collaborations between architects, scientists, and activists. The surveyor’s snapshot, used to document the localized damage that has occurred, is then superseded by mathematical models to predict the risk of damage that will have occurred. Similarly, the forum may no longer necessarily be a particular courthouse, but may instead be comprised of a rather diffuse network of communications and assemblies connected through the media. Despite these transformations, and across the diverse scales and epistemic fields that the project traverses, there is still something of the relation between the surveyor, structural analysis, and the forum that remains.

HD&ET In an interview with Robin Mackay, you said in relation to the occupation of Palestine by Israel: “Every form that the occupation has taken since 1967 has been presented as an attempt to end the occupation. Perhaps the only constant thing about the occupation is that there are always attempts to end it. […] The occupation is finally nothing but its constant end. […] Therefore we need to be suspicious of anyone that runs under the slogan ‘end the occupation’—they must have yet another spatial apparatus in mind.”[6] In Decolonizing Architecture (DAAR), a residency project started by Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, and yourself in Beit Sahour, you take the approach that the occupation, and its interminable end, should be reconfigured as a question of “decolonization.” Can you say more about what you mean by decolonization here? Toward what kind of a future does a practice of decolonization move if there is no end to the occupation?

EW I think that one of the biggest problems in thinking about the future of Palestine, a problem that somehow defines one’s “camp” within the Israeli or Palestinian anti-colonial left, is defined by what “state” you support as a solution. So we get the positions of one-statists versus two-statists versus no-statists, and a lot of very important and creative discussions are organized in relation to that. Surely, thinking politically, we are one-statists, but in DAAR, the studio that Sandi, Alessandro and I set up, we try to propose a different relation to the future, articulated through the process of decolonization.[7]

To do architecture in an area of such intense conflict is always to engage in a less-than-ideal world. This has to do not only with the violence that contaminates every aspect of life there, but also with determining the point from which speculation can begin. Conflicts create a sense of postponement and hence these future projections; we wait for the post-conflict to begin imagining. But the Palestine conflict is an endless conflict, so we feel that the “x-state solutions” are trapped in a top-down perspective. We did not start the project from the utopia of an end state in order to move backwards to the present; instead, we started from “real existing colonialism,” from the trash, buildings, infrastructure, and law that it creates. Our approach has been to reuse, rather than reject, the material conditions of the present. So we want to mobilize architecture as an optical device through actually existing structures—such as a military base, a settlement, the Palestinian parliament building, a particular Palestinian house in Battir, different houses in Jaffa in what is called ’48 Palestine—to study the conflict and to act within it.

HD&ET Can you talk a little more about the project where you proposed to repurpose an evacuated settlement for public use by Palestinians? One of the things that We are especially curious about is how you decide what kinds of public spaces might be useful. In the refugee camps, where most public space has been eliminated, how do you rebuild? What sort of community consultation does DAAR engage in?

EW The project started with the Palestinian Ministry of Planning in 2005, which had to advise on the fate of the settlements that were about to be evacuated in Gaza. The Palestinian Ministry of Planning became the centre of intense meetings between Palestinians and a variety of NGOs, different UN agencies, the World Bank, foreign governments, and international investors, all of whom outlined their proposed uses for the evacuated settlements. I was called on to advise. At the time we did not know whether they were going to be evacuated intact or whether they would be destroyed. We thought, or assumed at least, that they would be left intact, and because of this assumption the ministry wanted experts, or quasi-experts—architects—to partake in these discussions that were otherwise political and diplomatic. The main problem we were facing was that the land division in the West Bank and Gaza is such that most of the land is private (for many different reasons, not just the system of Israeli domination); it is owned by private families, and people do not sell land, so to have the settlements evacuated would give a precarious basis and infrastructure for a set of common areas. So this was the idea we were working with. Sandi, Ale, and I were working a lot with NGOs. They function as a kind of government, because the military rule doesn’t want to deal with the occupied population, and the Palestinian government is very absent and incompetent, so a network of NGOs somehow emerges, and it was really with those NGOs that we were deciding the uses of land. And then there is another aspect, I mean, what you plan is one thing and what happens on the ground is often another. In the end, the settlement was destroyed, so we could not repurpose the buildings. We did other things instead.

But there was a lot of resistance to this project, which was not really surprising. Many Palestinians said Israel should “dismantle the houses and take them away.” Or they wanted to “have a big bonfire,” which at DAAR we thought was great, because access to the colonies or military outposts should be experienced differently by all people who were at this place at that time. This popular impulse for destruction sought to give a sense of relief; architecture had to burn. Through this process of repossession we were experiencing a radical condition of architecture—the moment power is unplugged, when the old use is gone and new uses are not yet defined. It is the limit condition of architecture. But whatever may happen on the ground, the possibility of further evacuation should be considered. We were also worried that the infrastructure would simply be reused to reproduce colonial power relations: colonial villas to be inhabited by new financial elites, etc. In this sense, historical decolonization never truly did away with the spatialized power of colonial domination. So we acted according to a different option that sought to propose subversion of the originally intended use, repurposing it for other ends.

HD&ET The artist Adam Harvey has developed what he calls “Stealth Wear”: he manipulates the double ability of fashion to both reveal and conceal, creating clothing that shields the wearer from drone attacks by using a reflective material that effectively seals in the heat of the body so that it cannot be detected from the air.[8] You write that all architecture is a process of making and unmaking, an ideological restructuring of surfaces, yet so much of your work seems to be about making things visible, bringing injustices to light. Is it sometimes more desirable to create a surface of invisibility?

EW Yes, I understand what you are saying. I think that rather than operating on a single trajectory of increased visibility, mapping is always an intervention in the field of the visible. What is being foregrounded, what is being shown, and what is being “un-shown”—these are choices that we have to make with every map. When one thinks about the logic of sensing and aesthetics, one can understand the logic of disappearance as an aesthetics as well. For example, the resolution of commercially available satellite imagery of the kind we see in newspapers, such as suspected nuclear sites in Iran or destroyed villages in Darfur or Gaza, are limited to a resolution of half a metre per pixel, which means the size of a pixel is exactly the size, or the box, in which a human body fits. Within that logic of visibility, there is also a structured, built-in lacuna: the loss of the figure, or the human.

When one looks at facial recognition software, one understands that there are pretty simple ways of creating camouflage that is no longer a visual camouflage for the eye, but camouflage from algorithms, which now do a lot of the seeing. There are ways in which algorithms can be disturbed and confused with techniques that a human eye might have picked up on, but that an algorithm cannot discern. For example, there was a very strange accident in Dubai in 2010 where Israelis were trying to kill a Hamas operative who was using camouflage from the eye and from a certain face-recognition algorithm. Hamas thought they were camouflaged against one algorithm without realizing that the algorithm had changed! The Dubai police used different software and they were exposed. There are all sorts of counter-forensic practices.

HD&ET These counter-forensic practices seem especially related to the politics of visibility. In William Haver’s recent essay on sense and the commons, he seems to argue against Rancière’s analysis of the distribution of the sensible, suggesting that what is urgently needed is not a politics that reveals what is hidden—which is how Rancière’s work is often read—but a philosophy that allows us to see what we already see.[9] Haver quotes Foucault to help explain that the role of philosophy “is to render visible precisely what is visible, that is, to make appear that which is so near, that which is so immediate, so immediately bound to ourselves that we for that very reason do not perceive it. Then if the role of science is to make known that which we don’t see, the role of philosophy is to make us see what we see.”[10] It seems to us that Forensic Architecture could be located precisely at this intersection, between science and philosophy; how does such a position relate to the politics of visibility? Of evidence? Of the Anthropocene?

EW One aspect of the idea of counter-forensics is the inversion between the state and the police. Previously, criminals were conceived as individuals or groups; the state was the police. This also meant that, in most cases, the state had a technological and epistemological advantage over criminals. In our form of forensics, it is the state that is typically the criminal, and the individuals and groups—human rights organizations, environmental activists, NGOs, etc.—who act as the “police.” But this means that those perpetuating the violence also tend to control the scene of the crime. They also have an optical advantage. They can see places better, and can negate or deny by mobilizing state resources that are difficult to see. So, in a similar way to how you phrased it, we had to reveal what is invisible but also collect and analyze what is already in the public domain—visible but not seen, or seen and not well understood, like photos in social media and the low-resolution commercial satellite images from Google Earth. This means working around the evidence, not only with it. So, I identify with the way that Haver has framed the question, although this might be more complementary to the work of Rancière than you suggest, since in his philosophy and work on aesthetics and politics he has precisely called for reorganizing the way we see what is there but is not seen.

In FA, we undertake a number of investigations that are all about looking again at what exists in the public domain, organizing it, conceptualizing it, and cross-referencing it with other sources. When a killing happens in North Waziristan, there are echoes in local Pakistani media. Little of this is picked up by Western media. One of our researchers, Jacob Burns, has been trawling through these news media sites to find spatial patterns. How many homes were hit? How many people died in buildings, in cars, in cities, etc.? This requires making connections and cross-referencing different pieces of information from different media regarding these killings. All this information is in the public domain, but it is invisible because people only view this information in a cursory manner and do not sufficiently interrogate the connections.

For example, another aspect of our work on drones is to analysis mobile phone videos and still footage. Very little documentation has been smuggled out of Waziristan, which is under a state of siege, and where no one with a camera is allowed in or out. Whatever does come out is hard to trace and difficult to locate in both space and time. We have conducted an analysis of a specific strike in Miransha, evidence of which was smuggled out to US media through four different people. But the footage that was released just showed a blurry pile of rubble. We took the clip frame by frame and stuck them together to create a spatial panorama from this mobile phone sweep. Once we had the contour of the site, we analyzed it and measured the shadow to find the time of the day, then searched for the form of the building within the entire fabric of the town; we discovered the place with a high degree of probability. A part of the footage was of the room in which people died when a rocket entered through the ceiling. We analyzed the rubble and located the spread of fragmentation. We measured the pattern and density of the fragmentation and discovered gaps within them; we can assume that these gaps are the shadow of people that died in this room. There is so much data that exists in the public domain, but we need to develop ways of seeing it, ways of conceptualizing what we look for, and ways of mobilizing it. These ways of seeing rely, as you say, both on a theoretical conception and also on technological innovations. Together they turn noise into sound.

HD&ET In The Least of All Possible Evils, you identified a shift from thinking about genocide through primary effects toward the secondary effects outlined in a number of cases. We see this as a particularly powerful way to think about the relationships of complicity in warfare and of escaping some of the problems of “acceptable” deaths—because they have been calculated in advance—in acts of war. It also opens up the possibility of thinking about environmental catastrophe as a type of inflicted and purposeful genocide. Can you talk about this framework and how Forensic Architecture takes it up through the project on oceanic forensics and the “left-to-die boat”?

EW You are referring to the work of Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani, who worked with Situ Studio on this project. Charles and Lorenzo are PhD students at the CRA and research fellows on the Forensic Architecture project, and Situ Studio is an emerging architectural firm in New York. Together with FA, they have set up an important project of accountability in the Mediterranean.[11] The “left-to-die boat” that Charles, Lorenzo, and Situ have been mapping and writing about has become an issue within IHL because, to a certain extent, it is the first time the trace of a boat on water has been mapped. Things moving in water usually leave no trace. The team discovered GPS coordinates by tracing phone calls and then worked with an oceanographic institute to re-create the drift pattern of the Mediterranean. The migrants on board were drifting in one of the most cluttered parts of the Mediterranean, in the middle of a siege with a lot of military and NATO vessels—and nobody intervened. So their idea was to reverse the regime of surveillance: if Western states claim this is the most surveyed sea in the world, they also have the responsibility to protect those people who might drown in it. According to international laws of the high seas, if you hear an SOS call you must intervene. So, there is a series of legal challenges now based on the very unique ability to trace the movement of the boat in the sea.

This research represents an important and paradigmatic moment in the forensic architecture project that I run with a great team of artists, architects, and filmmakers—including Susan Schuppli and Thomas Keenan—in which various fellows, students, and Situ Studio are developing different abilities to visualize, map, and sense events, as well as advance political and legal claims, or political claims in the form of legal claims.

As critical scholars and practitioners we arrived at this project armed with critique. We felt confident in our ability to detect, unveil, and analyze instances where power is camouflaged as benevolence. Not only in the fields in which we investigated war crimes, but in the operation of the forums that administered this evidence and arbitrated on the basis of it. We have no illusions about the forums: we know they internalize the power field external to them, and that they are skewed towards the powerful. We have no illusions about the politics of international humanitarian law. We know that human rights forensics can become an extension of western surveillance practices. We have seen the way in which the HR and the legal process can be abused by states to amplify violence. We assumed, however, that the only way to conduct critical research in the world today is in close proximity to, and even complicity with, the subjects of our investigation. Like the traditional Operaist motto, we wanted to act inside and against!

HD&ET There seems to be a tension in your work between wanting to mobilize investigative journalism to denounce individuals publicly, as in the case of the Guatemalan genocide when you listed the accused (José Efraín Ríos Montt, Héctor Mario López Fuentes, Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores, and José Mauricio Rodriguez Sánchez), but also to articulate the diffused networks of responsibility, across human and nonhuman actors, through forensic architecture. When thinking about whether you are going to take one tactic or another, is it just a question of the particular forum in which you are presenting?

EW This issue has already erupted in the context of my previous work on critical theory in the military. In 2008, one of the military commanders I was writing about hired one of the largest legal firms in Israel to threaten me and my publishers in Israel for libel. The accusations were frankly ridiculous and concerned with technical matters.[12] I had research to support my allegations, but the real aim, I think, was to scare me and my peers from further publishing critical material that involved such detailed analyses of the military that named names and suggested personal responsibility and even liability. What this suit did was to remind us in the anti-colonial Israeli left of the power of this type of investigation. Indeed, within the controversy that ensued, one of the things that was brought to the forefront was our tendency to generalize and concentrate analysis on large, depersonalized systems—the military, the state, etc.—rather than concentrating our attention on the role that certain characters might have within these systems. It is exactly this interaction between larger forces and individual intention that is necessary to examine. In order to operate simultaneously, in one text, we needed to have two machines, so to speak, a theoretical one and a journalistic one, with the latter ferociously investigating certain issues and then placing them within a large theoretical frame of the former. But we did not have the legal infrastructure, nor the money to defend ourselves (even against the most spurious of libel claims), for the journalistic machine to work completely.

So this connects to your question about forensics and the relation between the individual and larger, shaping forces. Human rights have what we call a figure-ground problem. On the one hand, human rights discourse operates very much through a process of foregrounding individual victims and perpetrators. It is a conception that is based on a single human figure who is tortured or killed, repressed by an authoritarian regime. This is a process of figuration, the extraction of a figure from a political background. The individual is the subject of human rights analysis and her or his testimony is the way of getting into the logic of the event. Retribution is too often seen as the punishment of individual perpetrators, rather than as the dismantling of all structural, shaping forces within which injustice is perpetrated. This is figuration. An individual extracted from a political field and particular history narrated as a crime—as if it were a “simple” criminal case.

However, war crimes investigations call for a more complex analysis than those in the context of domestic criminal law. War crimes, like other wartime events, are produced by a multiplicity of agents woven together by networks that further distribute action and responsibility, using technologies that now increasingly have semi-autonomous decision-making capacities. For example, militaries are themselves diffused bodies that are, in turn, governed by political, institutional, and administrative logics.

On the other hand, some current human rights techniques have shifted attention to the ground. Satellite imagery, as Laura Kurgan beautifully shows in her new book, has become a relatively recent tool for HR investigators.[13] In satellite imagery, we no longer see figures. What becomes visible in these images is the background to human action—the land, the landscape, the built fabric, the destroyed buildings, the burnt fields, deforestation, flooding, etc. Instead of the figure, we have the ground that now stands for the condition of the human. This challenges an important principle within HR work, which is traditionally about the human (state of the individual) by the human (testimony). Given that viewing is now not only undertaken by prosthetic sensors, but interpreted by algorithms, it is no longer strictly a human domain. So, by inverting figure and ground in this gestalt, we have turned the ground into the object of study. We have “figured” the ground.

In our analysis of Operation Sofia—what is called “the last Indian massacre”—during the Guatemalan Civil war in the early 1980s, our team (including Situ Studio, Paulo Tavares, Daniel Pasqual, and myself) has sought to extend the understanding of genocide by shifting our attention to the ground condition, using maps and remote sensing of the region. We are trying to produce maps of the processes of large-scale deforestations, of road-building, and concentration-towns, of destruction of the villages of the native Ixil people, of fencing and “privatizing” their mode of cultivation in fields that were common property, to account for the changing of plant species, especially maize, that led to the massive destruction of this protected group and their way of life. We seek to account for the reorganization of people and material that has resulted in the destruction of the conditions that would sustain life. Indirect killing, which occurs more slowly and not by direct trauma such as bullet holes or machete wounds, challenges traditional forensic work.

This is what we call field causality, which is tied to debates around the entanglement of politics and the environment. Unlike the direct linear causality of criminal law, field causality does not seek to connect a chain of events. Instead, causes are understood as diffused aggregates that act simultaneously in all directions. They are shaping forces and they affect the formation of larger territories and political events. In other words, rather than looking simply at mortality, we take an epidemiological approach and look at patterns.

From the mid-nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century, the most important foundation of forensic science was the understanding that every contact leaves a trace and therefore if something touches something, one can actually recreate the moment of encounter. Adrian Lahoud, my successor at the Centre and member of our research team, has continuously insisted that we must look at the ways in which contact and trace have become separated and scattered, that is, that an action might happen in a certain place—an emission, for example—but its consequences might be felt across oceans and air currents.

This goes beyond the simple gestalt that concentrates on the human figure. We have lost sight of the ground, the political and environmental context; but while looking at the ground, we have lost the figure, as in the lacunae in satellite surveillance that I mentioned earlier. The task is to articulate new relationships between figure and ground, to find ways of understanding and illustrating rapid shifts in scale and the importance of events.

In the case of Guatemala, as in previous work on Palestine, this brings in all kinds of different actors—architects, road builders, agriculturists, farmers, bankers—who are all a part of a much more diffuse responsibility that must be addressed in a fashion outside of the usual legal system. Indirect, aggregate, or field causality seeks to undo another important distinction between different kinds of values we attach to death. There were people that were killed and people that died. To die, in this discourse, implies a secondary, non-intentional death. Recently, more work has been undertaken by epidemiologists in relation to non-direct mortality in wars. There was even an attempt by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the first prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), to include indirect mortality figures in his controversial charging of the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, with genocide in Darfur.

HD&ET It is an incredibly poignant argument to say that genocide is not just the barrel of a gun, but that it involves, instead, a network of diffused responsibility; still, aren’t there only a few legal venues to enforce these arguments? It makes us wonder what other avenues for redress there could be.

EW I agree. Moreno-Ocampo faced huge criticism for his decision to do that, as well as accusations of “inflating numbers” in the context of a very politicized campaign against Sudan. And I partially agree, but I think that this is the frontier of conflict investigation, and the consequences of such developments could be felt in different forums, as you say, not only in legal ones. Field causalities have a very different implication than direct causes for the way the forums have been made. Indeed, field causality could be the bastard’s best defense in court. It would be what every perpetrator would like to claim in order to avoid conviction, and is therefore not enough as a single line or argumentation; we need to learn how to link singularity to structural conditions. However, it is very important to insist on this because field causality describes a political diagram that must be dismantled, and not just by courts. It does not necessarily imply a judgment, but rather a more radical action in changing the political force field.

HD&ET Have the kinds of arguments developed through forensic architecture been used outside of the context of recent genocides and IHL? This kind of analysis, for example, could do a lot of justice in the context of the ongoing genocide of indigenous people in North America—how governments and industry force people into settlements, the ongoing contamination of lands, and the hazardous exploitation of resources through oil and mining practices, etc. Has the project of FA been advanced in these situations?

EW The senior person on our project, Susan Schuppli, is a Canadian theorist and artist, and she is looking at new claims brought up by indigenous communities in northern Canada and the new forums that have emerged to deal with these issues. She is also helping convene a group of M.A. members at our Centre who are working with the American NGO Three Degrees Warmer on a case brought by the Native Village of Kivalina, Alaska against Exxon Mobil Corp. These are, strictly speaking, outside of the legal frames of human rights and international humanitarian law, but as other members in our research groups have shown, and as I briefly alluded to above, environmental issues are increasingly resembling states of conflict. And, environmental law increasingly resembles the laws of war.

HD&ET In The Least of All Possible Evils, you explain that part of the justification for the use of drones is that they are “emotionless.” As Ronald Arkin, an American scientist and a leader in the field of weaponized robotics explained, robots have no joy in violence. It seems to me that part of the ongoing justification for extra-judicial killings by states rests not only on processes of rationalization, but also the diminishment of excess. There is, then, a fantasy about the elimination of the excesses of war. What has become distasteful to certain forms of state power in late capitalism is not “evil” or “violence,” but excess, Arkin’s “joy in violence.” To a certain extent, the materials you are dealing with in forensic architecture, as in any environment, are also inherently excessive, they spill over their boundaries and defy easy classification. How does your work negotiate these two different ways of dealing with excess?

EW Yes, in The Least of All possible Evils, the argument is that dealing with the excesses of war, rather than its more structural political causes, could be abused by militaries and states. The calculated conception of violence it puts forth can justify almost any atrocity. In this way the logic of the “least of all possible evils” is invoked to justify the use of a lesser violence to prevent the excesses you mentioned. This is the principle of proportionality, which is about the “too much” of war, without ever saying how much is too much. So, the argument conjures a cold calculus, a kind of economy of ethics where good and evil are traded like commodities, and speculated on in the financial economy. But economies are dangerous and volatile, as we have seen again recently. So, proportionality always has a relation to the disproportional, or the excess you mentioned—violence beyond reason, beyond calculation, the war of the mad, like the one Israel declared when it said that they were going to apply disproportional violence to Lebanon. In other words, they were going to break the law to maintain it. But disproportional violence is also the violence of the weak, those who cannot calculate, or wish not to, and those who are kept outside the economy of calculations. This violence is disproportional because it cannot be measured or calculated, and because, ultimately, when justice is not answered by the law, violence will continuously seek to altogether restructure the basis of law.

HD&ET Anselm Franke, whom you mentioned earlier, is curating the forthcoming Forensic Architecture exhibition as part of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s (HKW) ongoing Anthropocene-Project, an initiative involving cooperation with the Max Planck Gesellschaft, Deutsches Museum, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies. We are interested in how a venue like the HKW is another forum for the public consideration of the forensic practices that you have developed in architecture. While the work of Forensic Architecture seems to frequently engage the forum of the law, whether through IHL or environmental law, the forum of the public exhibition at the HKW seems to engage a different type of forum. Do you see these various forums as complementary? How does the public response to Forensic Architecture relate to its politico-juridical potential? And, how does working with a curator like Anselm Franke transform research that would otherwise be disseminated in legal or academic contexts?

EW Maybe there is an analogy to make between the presentation of spaces, landscapes, and objects in a courtroom, or in other political forums and assembly spaces, and a curatorial practice—such as Anselm’s—which uses the exhibition space as a laboratory for presenting, thinking through, gathering, and re-arranging forms of knowledge. Of course, every forum in which political speech is articulated has its own sort of protocol by which a relationship between people and things—that is, politics—is organized, mediated, and reorganized. However, it is also true that presenting things in each of these forums, whether forensic or curatorial, has something important in common: the presentation rearranges what can be said and heard in each of them; and, in both cases, such presentations can even call for making a new forum.

The intersection with Anselm’s work occurred much earlier than the Anthropocene Project. In 2003, we started working together on the exhibition “Territories” as a way of developing a research and curatorial practice that tried to be political and interventionist and used the exhibition, and its budget, to support research work in Palestine. The exhibition toured, and we managed to use the infrastructure of the art world to provide the research that was later recorded in Hollow Land.

Among other things, the conception of the forensic research was inspired by Anselm’s project on Animism, which he developed as a major part of his PhD at the CRA. What was important in this project was how he asked a series of questions regarding the ways in which claims for the agency of objects were part of very specific political situations. Rather than a general claim, his was a call to analyze the specificity of those situations.

The first public test of the forensics project was the exhibition Mengele’s Skull that Anslem curated with Tom Keenan, Nikolaus Hirsch, and myself. Later, several of our members were involved in events like the Anthropocene Project at HKW, where we sought to intervene by insisting on the missing politics, that is, on the way the reality of the Anthropocene must be understood through multiple conflicts that were missing from an analysis of the bureaucracies of science foregrounded in this project. Later on, several of our members participated in The Whole Earth exhibition, which Anselm curated at the HKW, which also helped frame our attempts, within the group, of taking the scale of forensic investigation to that of the planet itself.

I think there are probably several lessons to learn from the entanglement of exhibition and forensic practices; one of the most important, however, would be in relation to ongoing discussions about the immateriality of curating practices. I think, in fact, that a very precise empirical and material presentation is the best mode to instigate and mobilize political situations because politics is itself a process of materialization on different scales.