In my understanding truth is something
that is like a common resource
The truth is just like air on a water something
that we all need in order to understand
our position on Earth
We are a multidisciplinary University based group
that provides evidence for civil society
groups that are confronting state crimes
and Human Rights violations worldwide
So this is the simplest way to think about it
Something like we are pathologists of buildings
We read buildings, we read their ruins
when we understand what has taken place
Contemporary warfare is mainly
urban and architects are somehow
well-positioned to understand what has
happened within war so we might be
looking at buildings that have been destroyed
So reading the ruins and trying
to understand what has happened
The team has expanded so we used to be
two, three people now we are 17 I think
But the amazing thing about working
within a team like that is how you
can bring together multiple disciplines
You could examine the events from
multiple perspectives so it forces
people to understand how an acoustic
expert thinks or a fluid dynamics
experts would think or how a filmmaker
thinks versus how an architect would think
Yes she says it twice in the beginning
I think that was clear about the beginning
But I think there is really nice
multi-channel voices that we could do
If you show that the
panorama is through the panorama you
understand space and then you can use
the model to understand the relation
between the images it's completely
different than just usign it as a dummy
Seeing these at the Tate in panorama
works better projected live
Exhibition is just another place that could raise some
of those questions
How does architecture relate to it?
How does art relate to it?
How does light become an element that might
determine visibility?
How does the frame
of an image somehow clip away in a
certain part of the event that we have to reconstruct?
How does the shakiness of the lens
testify to the person who's
taking the footage what does it say
about their anxiety, their fear, their body language right?
All of those things are things we can we can discuss
within an exhibition space more than we can in a court
We were just looking at the
footage from Keren Manor, who's an
activist from Activestills
She was shooting throughout the night
She didn't know what she had seen and what she had
witnessed but actually she had actually
filmed the entire event
Although very blurry and dark and hard to see
there are fragments of information in there
that are very useful and that we used
throughout our investigation
We were just looking at how we were gonna use
her footage within the Turner exhibition
because we wanted to have it as the
first thing that you encounter when you come in
And to convey somehow
what it's like to be an activists on the ground at
an event like that
When we don't have even images or videos
or audio recordings then we might have
to depend only on witness testimonies
So in this case we use architecture in a
different way we interview witnesses
based on 3D models so we ask them to
rebuild the space of those events
By using a 3D model we help them remember more
We find exhibitions extremely important forums for us
Of course the danger is always to
trivialize an important thing and then
you need to be working very close with
the communities on the ground in order
to not trivialise an act of violence
and activities are painful both for the
communities and for us to deal with
by placing it in an art institution
We want also people to know that art is not only
a license to fictionalise
That the aesthetic practices could be very useful
but that there is things that we
can do with the very basic tools and
techniques that we have as architects, as
filmmakers, as artists
The software that we all have on our laptops
could be very powerful tools in confronting state and
government lies