Forensic Architecture

On 6 November 1985, a guerrilla group known as M19 stormed the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, taking state officials and members of the Colombian Supreme Court hostage. Security forces initiated a counter-siege that lasted two days, leaving over a hundred dead and large parts of the building burned. Instead of focusing on what happened inside the Palace between the guerrillas and the military, a new visual investigation by FA and the Truth Commission examines the logistics of the military in their counterinsurgency operation and what happened to certain individuals once they left the building. -FA

On December 20, 2019, Chilean security forces used unprecedented amounts of tear gas within a relatively small area against people participating in a peaceful and unarmed demonstration. Using open source analysis and fluid dynamic simulations, we measured the concentration of tear gas in the air in that territory to estimate the scale of health risks inflicted on civilians that day.

Clouds are always double. Seen from the outside they are measurable objects, seen from within they are experiential conditions of optical blur and atmospheric obscurity. Today’s clouds are both environmental and political. Their toxic fog is easily surrounded by lethal doubt. When ‘post-truth’ and denialism obscure acts of violence and compound the harm, we, the inhabitants of toxic clouds, must find new ways of resistance.

On April 6, 2006, Halit Yozgat was murdered by the National Socialist Underground at an Internet café in Kassel. State intelligence officer Andreas Temme was in the café around the same time. An architectural dissection of his police statement.

Shortly after midnight on 18 September 2013, Pavlos Fyssas, a young Greek anti-fascist rapper, was murdered in Athens, in his home neighbourhood of Keratsini. Both the killer and others who participated in the attack were members of the neo-Nazi organisation Golden Dawn.Golden Dawn have committed acts of violence against migrants and political opponents ever since their formation in the 1980s, yet most of their crimes have gone unpunished as a result of silent support among the ranks of the Greek police, many of whom are aligned to their nationalist cause. Forensic Architecture was commissioned by the family of Pavlos Fyssas, and their legal representatives, to reconstruct the events of the night from the audio and video material made available to the court.

Along the coastline of the Gaza Strip, beneath layers of rubble, lies one of Palestine’s hidden treasures and one of the region’s most important archaeological sites. Repeated bombings, and the humanitarian disaster inflicted on Palestinian communities by the decades-long Israeli occupation and siege, as well as advancing coastal erosion and necessary development within the enforced densification of Gaza, have placed this unique site under existential threat. -FA

Since 2018, Forensic Architecture has been working with ‘synthetic images’-photorealistic digital renderings of 3D models-to train machine learning classifiers. Model Zoo includes a growing collection of 3D models of munitions and weapons, as well as the different classifiers trained to identify them making a catalogue of some of the most horrific weapons used in conflict today.

On 28 October 2015, a migrant boat left the coast of Western Turkey heading to the closest European coast – the Greek island of Lesvos. The shipwreck resulted in the death of at least 43 people, making it the deadliest incident of that period, also known as “the long summer of migration.” One of the survivors, the artist Amel Alzakout, recorded the journey and the shipwreck on a waterproof camera attached to her wrist. This footage – which also forms the basis of her subsequent film Purple Sea – provides a unique situated perspective on this tragic event at the threshold of Europe.

In late summer of 2014, the Ukrainian Armed Forces battled pro-Russian separatists for control of the town of Ilovaisk, in the border region of Donetsk, eastern Ukraine. By September, the separatists had won a resounding victory, routing the retreating Ukrainian army. Even as the battle was ongoing, however, allegations swirled that regular units of the Russian army had joined the battle on the side of the separatists, tipping the balance decisively in their favour. Russia denied the charges. But, in what became a watershed moment for open source investigation, communities of researchers, reporters, and citizen journalists gathered substantial and compelling open source evidence for the presence of the Russian military in the region. This video is a documentary piece that ventures both into the realms of science and politics (it’s part of the body of evidence submitted to the European Court of Human Rights in the form of an interactive platform).

On the evening of 1 June 2018, a large group of Palestinian protesters gathered at one of the five principal protest sites, near the village of Khuzaa. At 6:31pm, a shot was fired from beyond the border fence into the crowd. The bullet killed Rouzan al-Najjar, 21, a volunteer medic. Two of her fellow medics, Mohammed Shafee and Rami Abo Jazar, were wounded at the same time. The death of al-Najjar, who was widely revered among the protesters, sent shockwaves throughout Palestine. Forensic Architecture was commissioned by the New York Times to undertake spatial analysis of the scene of al-Najjar’s death. By digitally recreating the protest site from video evidence, we used the precise location of the three gunshot victims as a means to derive the trajectory of the bullet, and trace its ‘cone of fire’ back to its origin, a sniper’s berm at the border fence. -FA

On 27 February 2020, the Turkish government opened its borders with Greece in an attempt to exert political pressure on the EU over Syria. Thousands of migrants and refugees were funneled to a single point on the land border between the two countries, the border fence near Kastanies/Pazarkule, with the promise of an open route to Europe. The Greek government responded by deploying its police and military to the region. It warned migrants not to cross, and suspended its asylum system. On 4 March, violence escalated near the border crossing. Reports emerged of shootings, and casualties. Our analysis shows that it is highly probable that the shots that killed Gulzar and, in all likelihood, wounded the remaining six casualties were fired from the Greek side of the border. -FA

When a leaking petrochemical tank at the Marathon Petroleum refinery in Louisiana's 'Cancer Alley' caught fire, it produced a thick plume of toxic smoke that spread for miles over neighbouring communities. Authorities claimed that nearby residents were unaffected, even as reports of severe health impacts emerged. Fearing a cover-up, some of those residents asked FA to investigate.

Shortly after 6:00pm on 4 August 2020, an explosion ripped through the port of Beirut. It killed more than two hundred people, wounded over 6,500, and destroyed large parts of the city. Forensic Architecture was invited by Mada Masr to examine open source information including videos, photographs, and documents to provide a timeline and a precise 3D model to help investigate the events of that day.

On 4 August 2011, Mark Duggan was shot to death by police in Tottenham, north London, after undercover officers forced the minicab in which he was travelling to pull over. As the vehicle came to a stop, Duggan opened the rear door, and leapt out. Within seconds, an advancing officer known only by his codename, V53, had fired twice. V53 would later tell investigators that he saw a gun in Duggan’s hand, and felt his life to be in danger. But following the shooting, the gun in question was found around seven metres away from where Duggan had been shot, on a nearby patch of grass.

The August 2020 explosion in the port of Beirut—understood to be one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions in recorded history—killed over 200 people and injured over 6,500, while devastating large parts of the city. Lebanese and international authorities quickly came to the same conclusion: The vast quantities of ammonium nitrate stored in warehouse 12 were detonated by a fire that was the consequence of shoddy welding work that had been carried out by Syrian workers on site earlier in the day. Building on our previous investigation with Mada Masr into this deadly explosion, in which we mapped the progression of the fire, the epicentre of the blast, and the layout of the contents stored inside the warehouse, Forensic Architecture and the FFA Investigative Unit looked into the validity of these widely circulated claims about the origins of the fire.

On 1 December 2018, on the margins of a gilets jaunes protest in Marseille, 80-year-old Zineb Redouane was struck in the face by a tear gas grenade as she was standing at the window of her fourth-floor apartment. The following day, she died in hospital. In May 2020, a new element was added to judicial investigation that was ongoing: the report of a ballistics expert, intended to establish whether the officer who fired the shot, a member of France’s CRS riot police, had followed procedure. The report clears the officer, who has still not been identified. Using elements of that report, and a detailed 3D model of the scene, Disclose and Forensic Architecture re-examined the case, reconstructing the precise sequence of events before, during, and after the killing.

On 19 February 2022, June Knightly and other members of an anti-fascist affinity group in Portland, Oregon were attacked by a right-wing extremist. June was murdered and four of her friends seriously injured. Despite knowing the attack was unprovoked, the Portland Police Bureau released an inaccurate statement suggesting the incident had been a confrontation between an 'armed homeowner' and 'armed protesters'. Forensic Architecture (FA) interviewed witnesses and survivors of the Normandale Park attack using a navigable digital 3D model of the scene, built from previously unpublished video of the attack recorded by one of the victims, drone images and video of the police response posted on social media.

On 7 April 2018, the city of Douma, Syria, was targeted by two chemical weapons attacks. At that time, the city and its surrounding areas had been under siege by the Syrian military since 2013. At least 70 people died in the attacks, according to reports. Two distinctive yellow canisters, similar to those previously linked to chlorine gas attacks across Syria, were found following the strikes: one on a rooftop balcony near to Al Shuhada square, and the other in a bedroom at an unknown location in the city. We reconstructed the two sites as 3D models using available images and video material. We also reconstructed the canisters as digital objects and analysed the physical traces inscribed on them. -FA

Vaca Muerta, Argentina, is one of the world's largest shale oil and gas deposits, that deposit is also home to the indigenous Mapuche people. In 2013, a new deal saw U.S. energy giant Chevron (energy) enter Vaca Muerta, opening the region for the first time to the international oil and gas industry. In collaboration with The Guardian, FA investigated a local Mapuche community's claim that the oil and gas industry has damaged their ancestral land, eroded their traditional ways of life and irreversibly damaged the environment.

Building on Forensic Architecture’s previous investigation into herbicidal warfare and its effects on Palestinian farmers along the eastern perimeter of the occupied Gaza Strip, this investigation marks Land Day in Palestine by examining the systematic targeting of orchards and greenhouses by Israeli forces since October 2023. Our analysis reveals that this destruction is a widespread and deliberate act of ecocide that has exacerbated the ongoing catastrophic famine in Gaza and is part of a wider pattern of deliberately depriving Palestinians of critical resources for survival.