The exhibition that we have here at the Whitworth with Forensic Architecture
is looking at the way in which states and corporations weaponize the air we breathe.
So whether that's tear gas, through air pollution, through the use of herbicide
and it's all brought together through the film which occupies the central gallery
and i think what's so interesting for us at the Whitworth about that
is it really shifts the way in which the art gallery operates as a site for accountability.
Our mandate is to develop new evidentiary techniques
for bringing accountability and liability to those who perpetrate violence
the states, the militaries, and the corporations
and in order to bring accountability for them, around them
we need new investigative techniques, we need new methodologies
The process of working with them has been pretty extraordinary really
because in a way when you work with them, you are in a way getting on that bus
in terms of supporting them in their continued investigations.
I established Forensic Architecture ten years ago.
Forensic Architecture emerged out of the Centre for Research Architecture
a kind of crazy experimentation of people coming from different backgrounds
different disciplinary backgrounds
coming to think together about the limit of representation,
the limit of a certain form of practice and trying to break it
and I think at its best that's what Goldsmiths does
and enabled forensic architecture to grow within it
because they kind of trusted us to give us the space and time
to develop that mode of practice.
In the exhibition you see a range of our techniques that are developed.
In the case of forest fires in Indonesia and in West Papua
we use satellites to identify the sources of fire and their location in relation to the boundary
in order to bring accountability towards who is setting these fires and if they're intentional or not.
In Louisiana there is an 85 mile region that spans from the state capital of Baton Rouge to New Orleans
called Cancer Alley.
So this territory today has become the petrochemical corridor.
In December of 2019 the fence line community activists group Rise St James
and their legal counsel the Center for Constitutional Rights
announced that four cemeteries of historically enslaved people
had been identified on property owned by a petrochemical company called Formosa Plastics.
So there was a question raised by Rise and by CCR
of “okay, if we found these three cemeteries, where are the rest?”
They kind of gave us a call to action,
they said it would be amazing if we could develop a predictive method
for identifying where these cemeteries might be across the region.
What we did was we sourced 300 years of historic maps, aerial photography,
as well as property surveys, so we were able to overlay them to combine them
and actually weave together this sort of field of probability
to determine where cemeteries are likely to be located on these hundreds of plantations
across this area of focus.
We think about Forensic Architecture not as a practice but as a field
so we support and promote anyone that would use our methods
and we're establishing now offices and collaborations
in Ramallah, in Paris, in Sao Paulo in Brazil, in Berlin, and in other places.
By bringing our kind of work - science meet art, architecture meet law - together
and show it in an art context, you also transform what it is that art institutions can do today
what is the role of a museum and public galleries in society today?
What I see for us is more and more Intersections, it's more and more collaborations
and with that is hopefully new ways of bringing accountability.