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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Return to al-Ma’in chronicles the multiyear collaboration between Forensic Architecture (FA) and Palestinian historian and Nakba survivor Salman Abu Sitta on the reconstruction of his birthplace, the lost village of Ma’in Abu Sitta (or al-Ma’in). Guided by the work and memories of Abu Sitta, FA-researchers reconstructed al-Ma’in’s occupation by Israeli forces on 14 May 1948, its subsequent demolition, and the settlements constructed on its ruins. The movie looks to the present moment and the connections between Israeli military’s conduct and appropriation of Palestinian land during and after 1948, and today in Gaza. The project looks back at the sophistication and sensitivity with which the Abu Sitta family cultivated their land, and the rich agricultural diversity that was lost when Israeli settlements were subsequently constructed over this landscape.

Between 1960 and 1996, Guatemala was consumed by conflict between an increasingly militarized state and a widespread rural insurgency. The state's counterinsurgency efforts peaked in the late 1970s, when security forces pursued guerrillas into the country's highlands. According to a 1999 report by Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), a UN-backed body established toward the end of the conflict, more than 200,000 people were killed or disappeared during more than three decades of violence. FA was commissioned by a Guatemalan NGO, the Center for Human Rights Legal Action (CALDH), to support its efforts to gather evidence for the trial of the country's former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, whose brief military regime lasted from March 1982 to August 1983, and senior members of his security apparatus. Montt would eventually be convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity.

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.

On the evening of 16 March 2017, a US drone strike targeted Sayidina Omar Ibn al-Khattab Mosque in al-Jinah, in Aleppo province, Syria. According to witnesses, the strike took place when close to three hundred people were in the building. Most were gathering for the night prayer, while others remained in the smaller ‘winter prayer hall’ where a religious seminar had just finished. The Syrian Civil Defense, also known as the White Helmets, claimed to have recovered the bodies of thirty-eight civilians, including five children. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported forty-two dead. -FA

We examined videos from the 2008–2009 Gaza conflict, and from Fallujah, Iraq, where US forces had deployed against the Iraqi army in white phosphorus in 2004. Within a parametric model, we simulated projectiles detonating over various configurations of a generic urban environment. We concluded that in Gaza, white phosphorus was likely used to harass and terrorise citizens in order to clear neighbourhoods, rather than as a ‘smoke screen’, as the Israeli military had claimed. -FA

Following the EU-Turkey agreement of March 2016, Turkey had contained inside its territory refugees and migrants trying to reach Greece and the EU. However, on 27 February 2020, the Turkish government encouraged and mobilized thousands of migrants and refugees to cross into Greece at the Evros/Meriç region in order to exert political pressure on the EU to comply with Turkish interest in Syria. On 2 March, after several days of tension, violence escalated at the border. Reports emerged of shootings, and a casualty near the river delta. The victim was identified as Muhammad al Arab, a young man from Aleppo, Syria. We established that rounds were fired along that stretch of the border on that day and Muhammad al-Arab was killed in Turkish soil within 15-135m from a group of armed Greek soldiers standing right on the border. Our analysis supports the testimony of several witnesses who claim that al-Arab was shot by this group of Greek soldiers. -FA

Since Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency of Brazil in 2019, vast tracts of the Amazon rainforest and the indigenous communities that live in and care for it have been subjected to increasing violence and a rapid increase in illegal gold mining, encouraged by his administration's rhetoric and policies. The research had three interrelated dimensions: the policies adopted by the Bolsonaro administration, the violent attacks against Yanomami villages, and the destruction of the environment. The evidence strongly suggested that the policies and rhetoric of the Bolsonaro administration before and during his presidential term correspond with the rapid increase in environmental destruction and violence against indigenous peoples throughout the Amazon.

On 2 June 2020, the PPB deployed large amounts of tear gas in an attempt to force protestors to withdraw from the streets and squares of downtown Portland, unleashing a highly toxic cloud of airborne chemicals onto the same citizens it was tasked with protecting. That day would become known locally as ‘Tear Gas Tuesday’. Drawing on publicly available information, we counted, located and identified the different munitions used that night by the PPB, and created a simulation of the toxic tear gas cloud in order to measure the exposure, spread, and concentration of tear gas throughout the city. -FA

On 17 October 2023, a devastating explosion took place in the car park of al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City. British-Palestinian doctor and distinguished reconstructive surgeon Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah was working at Ahli Hospital at the time of the blast. In April 2024, Forensic Architecture (FA) began working with Dr Abu-Sittah to reconstruct the events of the night as he experienced them. Using an interview practice called ‘situated testimony’, FA worked with Dr Abu-Sittah to retrace his steps through a 3D reconstruction of the hospital compound, in which FA had geolocated and ‘photomatched’ visual evidence recorded by survivors of the blast, including Dr Abu-Sittah himself, and journalists.

On the night of the 26-27 September 2014, a group of students and activists from the Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa were attacked in the town of Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. The students had commandeered buses to take them to a political protest in Mexico City. The attacks were committed by local police in collusion with criminal organisations and other branches of the Mexican security apparatus, including state and federal police and the military. Six people were murdered, 40 wounded, and 43 students were forcibly disappeared.

The village of al-Araqib in the northern Naqab desert has been demolished over 170 times over the past sixty years. Israeli authorities argue that the village did not exist prior to the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel, and that as such, the Bedouin villagers are trespassers, and their settlements illegal. Since 2015, Forensic Architecture has worked alongside the families of al-Araqib to provide historical and juridical evidence not only to support their own claims to their land, but on behalf of communities throughout the illegalised Palestinian Bedouin villages at the northern threshold of the Naqab desert. - FA

Commissioned by Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, this investigation reveals new evidence about massacres conducted in the Palestinian village of Tantura by Israeli forces after its occupation on 22-23 May 1948 and subsequent depopulation. Launched on the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, it brings together testimonies and photographic evidence to locate several mass graves in which the victims were buried—including one previously unidentified.

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 4 October 2010, a home on the outskirts of Mir Ali, North Waziristan, was struck by several missiles. The attack killed five people, including some who were suspected of involvement acts of terrorism. Together with the witness, we reconstructed a digital model of her house, according to her descriptions. This virtual environment then became a medium for testimony: by positioning the witness’ point-of-view within the digital model, we helped her to ‘walk’ through it as if it were her own house. In this way, this project saw the genesis of a new element of FA’s practice, a new mode of witness interviewing, that we call ‘situated testimony’. -FA

On 8 March 2015, three bombs landed near the Turkey-Syria border, between the town of Atimah, Syria and a nearby internally displaced persons (IDP) camp, where more than thirty thousand civilians were sheltered. No military force claimed responsibility for the attack. Forensic Architecture (FA) and Airwars together determined it was likely to be a US strike on al-Qaeda militants who operated in the area. -FA

On 6 November 2017, a rescue vessel operated by the NGO Sea Watch (SW) and a patrol vessel of the Libyan coastguard were both en route towards a migrants’ boat, in distress in international waters. The boat, a few hours out of Tripoli, was carrying between 130 and 150 passengers. A confrontational rescue operation ensued, and while SW was able to rescue fifty-nine passengers, bringing them to safety in Italy, at least twenty died before or during the incident, while forty-seven passengers were ultimately ‘pulled back’ to Libya, where several faced grave human rights violations – including being detained, beaten, and sold to another captor who tortured them to extract ransom from their families. -FA

In the early hours of 9 January 2009, a missile struck the Salha family’s home in Beit Lahiya, Gaza. Under the direction of Fayez and Noor, we constructed a digital model of their home, helping father and son to reconstruct the events of the night. -FA

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