Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic There is barely a whisper during the premiere of the film Situated Testimonies of Grenfell at the Royal College of Art in London. Nobody even glances at a phone; we are immersed in that terrible night in 2017 when fire ripped through Grenfell Tower in west London, killing 72 people.Including recordings of emergency calls, accounts of residents’ pre-existing safety concerns and social-media footage of the blaze, the film also reveals the process of its own construction as we see architectural software developers sit with survivors and eyewitnesses, while software experts recreate the building and its destruction using 3D modelling. Meticulous and detached yet filled with emotion, the film is a chilling, unequivocal condemnation of the multi-agency failures that led to the tragedy.The film is also a form of evidence. Created by multidisciplinary research agency Forensic Architecture, in collaboration with members of the Grenfell community, Situated Testimonies of Grenfell was shown in court as part of a civil claim against private companies, local and government agencies and the London fire brigade.From Banksy’s refugee-friendly actions to the exposés of Ai Weiwei, numerous creative practitioners narrow the gap between art and life. But few walk that tightrope with more purposeful precision or powerful effect than Forensic Architecture. Founded by the British-Israeli architect Eyal Weizman in 2010, the collective’s members include architects, lawyers, scientists, software developers and “aesthetic practitioners” such as artists and curators. Based at Goldsmiths, University of London, where Weizman teaches, the collective’s reports, which investigate alleged acts of violence by state or corporate agencies, have stretched from Myanmar to the US.Its varied skillsets — from detailed analysis of a photograph or footage to the reconstruction of a bullet’s trajectory — help them to expose falsehoods and lacunae in official narratives. Its recent report, Inhumane Zones, into alleged human rights violations in Gaza, is being used by South Africa in its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.But their work operates as art as well as evidence: the agency has also been shortlisted for the Turner prize. Shown at Tate Britain, their Turner installation centred on a film about the shooting of a Bedouin villager, Yaqub Musa Abu alQu’ian, and a policeman, Erez Levi, by Israeli police. Another film, The Killing of Mark Duggan, was central to War Inna Babylon: The Community’s Struggle for Truths and Rights, an exhibition about Black activism and resistance at the ICA in London in 2021.“There’s a parallel between forensics and curating,” Weizman says as we sit down in a light-filled studio at Goldsmiths. “You need to proceed with an argument using images, and sometimes objects, and you need to tell a story that is convincing and coherent.”Although Weizman studied at the Architectural Association in London, his awareness that architecture had its own politics was seeded in his Israeli youth. Born in Haifa in 1970, Weizman grew up alongside Palestinian people. He has fond memories of Haifa: “It was so fabulous . . . with the mountains [and] the sea on all sides.” But he also observed an “architecture of colonisation”: Israeli neighbourhoods occupied the city’s heights while Palestinians were “contained” in the valley. Returning after his studies, he focused on how architecture was employed to reinforce Israeli domination, particularly in the Occupied Territories.His work has always raised hackles. In 2002, the Israeli Association of United Architects cancelled an exhibition that it had commissioned from Weizman and his fellow architect Rafi Segal for the Berlin Congress of Architecture about settlement construction. Entitled A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, it was described by the commissioners as “one-sided political propaganda”. However Esther Zandberg, the architecture critic of Israeli newspaper Haaretz, defended the show and its catalogue as a “rare work in its power and importance”.The cancellation triggered international media attention — “The New York Times reported on it and made a big fuss, so everybody wanted to see what was censored,” Weizman says — and a new series of shows evolved, entitled Territories, which preceded the foundation of Forensic Architecture.By now, Weizman was “thinking very hard about presenting evidence in public spaces”. Yet he was surprised to find himself adopting forensics — or counter-forensics, as he sometimes dubs it — as a tactic. “If someone had told me I would end up running a forensic agency 20 years ago . . . I would have been appalled.” he says. But there was also, as he puts it, “a battle about truth”.He pauses. “The way I experienced colonialism is that it’s a violence against people but it’s also a violence against truth. Against the truth that those things have happened.” The decision to create Forensic Architecture was a bid to “work collaboratively and in a multidisciplinary way” and “take forensics out of the court and into the public domain of art and media”. Today, Forensic Architecture numbers a core team of 26 plus a further 13 research fellows. Their funding comes from donors and organisations, such as the Sigrid Rausing Trust, and income from commissions and exhibitions. They are no strangers to challenge. At the Whitney Biennial 2019, their film Triple-Chaser investigated a tear-gas grenade manufactured by a group owned by Whitney Museum vice-chair Warren Kanders, who had become an object of protest since the group’s tear gas was fired at civilians by US border guards. Triple-Chaser intensified the pressure on Kanders to resign, which he did.Weizman embraces the friction. Forensic’s work, he says, “should sit uneasy within an art institution . . . [Museums] want political credibility. They invite us and then they are surprised when our art becomes political!”In legal settings, they work to “transform what can be presented as evidence”. Weizman takes a breath. “The law is very conservative. It took a few decades before photography was considered reliable evidence. Now it’s the same with open-source evidence [such as that] captured on Twitter and YouTube. You need to claim other ways of seeing; other ways of telling.”The scrupulous remapping within a report such as Inhumane Zones, which compares Israeli plans for safe zones and humanitarian aid in Gaza with UN satellite imagery, media footage and witness testimony, exemplifies Weizman’s observation that his team’s job is to “interpret weak signals”, perhaps no more than “a few pixels in an image, a faint trace, on a tree, on the ground marked in the concrete”. In a world where truth is so contested, that skill has never been more valuable.forensic-architecture.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
