Architect Eyal Weizman Lectures On Forensic Architecture at REDCAT

Clyde Snow presents a slide of the skull of Liliana Pereyra, in the 1985 trial of members of the Argentine junta for crimes committed in the ‘dirty war’ (1976–1983).

Eyal Weizman, architect, professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, and director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, lectures about forensic architecture—a highly specialized field that involves analyzing buildings for structural and design failures—titled Forensis at REDCAT on Thursday (Oct. 31).

Weizman is also the director of Forensic Architecture, an institute that focuses on the place of forensic architecture in humanitarian law. In his talk, he will examine the term “forensis” as it relates to political struggles and discuss forensic architectural investigations in Palestine, Yemen, Pakistan, the former Yugoslavia and Guatemala. Other topics include the controversial use of forensic architectural evidence, such as the trial of Holocaust denier David Irving.

From the program notes:

Architecture is employed as a field of knowledge and as a mode of interpretation, one not only concerned with buildings but rather with an ever-changing set of relations between people and things across multiple scales… The courts in which forensics is asked to perform embody, of course, the logic of the states that established them. But forensis could become a counter hegemonic practice that could invert the relation between individuals and states, helping to challenge state and corporate violence and the tyranny of their truth.

Below is a video of Weizman explaining forensic architecture and his research.