HUMLEBÆK.- Witnesses is the fifth exhibition in The Architect’s Studio series at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, presenting the multidisciplinary research group Forensic Architecture which in no way is reminiscent of a traditional studio. They practice forensic architecture to investigate human rights violations including violence committed by states, police forces, militaries, and corporations.

Forensic Architecture, led by architect Eyal Weizman, includes not only architects but also artists, software developers, journalists, lawyers and animators. Working with grassroots activists, international NGOs and media organizations, the team carries out investigations on behalf of people affected by political conflict, police brutality, border regimes and environmental violence.

In the broadest possible sense, Forensic Architecture uses architectural tools and methods to conduct spatial and architectural analysis of particular incidents. Visualizing and rendering in 3D, they not only reconstruct a space but also document what happened in it. Forensic Architecture’s work is a far cry from the usual practice of architecture.

Forensic Architecture gives a voice to materials, structures and people by translating and disseminating the evidence of the crimes committed against them, telling their stories in images and sound. When an incident of violence and its witnessing are spatially analysed, they acquire visual form. Accordingly, Forensic Architecture is also an aesthetic practice studying how space is sensitised to the events that take place within it. The investigation and representation of testimony depends on how an event is perceived, documented and presented.

Witnesses, traces, data

Louisiana’s exhibition has three sections. The first section, Witnesses, introduces the different types of witnesses, traces and data at the core of Forensic Architecture’s work. A large video installation shows how different forms of testimony are documented and represented in architectural models.

The second section of the exhibition, Modes of Sensing, describes the work of reading changes in material witnesses such as brick, leaves and smokes. Methods include 3D modelling, fieldwork, machine learning, images-spaces and reconstructions. Two full-scale reconstructions of crime scenes have been built for the exhibition, in the Sculpture Park and in the second section of the exhibition:

One reconstruction is of a site hit by a drone strike in Miranshah, North Waziristan, in 2012, where four people were killed. Since 2004, American drones have killed thousands of civilians in the area, though the CIA has neither confirmed nor denied these events. Forensic Architecture has mapped a single drone strike, demonstrating how to document the strikes and the loss of civilian lives.

The second reconstruction is of an internet café in Kassel, Germany, where Halit Yozgat, 21, was shot and killed by a group of neo-Nazis. An agent of the German domestic intelligence service, Verfassungsschutz, was in the café but claimed not to have witnessed the actual murder. The space was built to recreate the agent’s testimony and the police reconstruction of the agent's conduct. This section takes us into the evidence against the agent, into Forensic Architecture’s own courtroom.

The third section of the exhibition, Itinerant Witnesses, shows witnesses documenting their attempts to cross borders in Europe. Issues of migration and border policy are unpacked in eyewitness documentation and Forensic Architecture’s mapping of migrant journeys.

Forensic Architecture

Unlike established forms of crime and conflict investigation, Forensic Architecture employs a number of unconventional and unique methods to shed light on events, based on the spaces where they took place. This retrospective exhibition focuses on the act of witnessing as a spatial practice. Witness testimony, which sits at the centre of human rights discourse, can be more than viva voce, oral testimony in a court. Any material, like leaves, dust and bricks, can bear witness.

Forensic Architecture investigates and gives a voice to material evidence by using open source data analysed using cutting-edge methods partly of their own design. Using 3D models, they facilitate memory recollection from witnesses who have experienced traumatic events. The objective is to reconstruct the ‘space’ in which the incident in question took place and then re-enact the relevant events within this constructed model.

The most important sources tend to be public: social media, blogs, government websites, satellite data sources, news sites and so on. Working with images, data, and testimony and making their results available online while exhibiting select cases in galleries and museums, Forensic Architecture brings its investigations into a new kind of courtroom.