The Last Responders

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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 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

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

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.

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

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