Forensic Architecture

In this podcast, Imani Jacqueline Brown tells us about her formative experience as an activist in New Orleans and in the crucible of Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street movement. We also talk about eugenics and about how Carl Linnaeus’s philosophy during the Enlightement divided existence into parcels of private property, about oil infrastructure networks and environmental racism in Death Alley, and about apocalypse as repeated events. Along the way, Imani imagines paths to ecological reparation, ways to steward and attend to the world. She finds that it is precisely the uncultivated land at the back of the plantation that is rich with life and possibility: the seed banks of new growth.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with architect and the senior researcher at Forensic Architecture, Samaneh Moafi. We talk about strategies for establishing cases of ecocide, about the complexity of analysing satellite images, about carbon monoxide mapping, and about working in networks.

Samaneh Moafi is an architect and the senior researcher at Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. She oversees the Centre For Contemporary Nature, a division within Forensic Architecture which explores the relationship between human rights violations, environmental violence, and anthropogenic climate change. In this podcast, Samaneh Moafi turns our gaze to notions of ecocide, negative commons and environmental violence in pursuit of accountability and change. In doing so, she takes us through the Negev desert, extraterritorial toxic clouds, orangutan nests in Indonesia, forest fires and weaponised wind gusts in the Gaza strip.

In our second conversation with founding director of Forensic Architecture Eyal Weizman, we explore further the nuances of their sophisticated research practice, this time focusing on the notions of time and duration from a forensic perspective in order to unfold multiple temporalities from an instant. In doing so, Weizman explains how to build a case for public truth using clouds, architecture, metadata, shadows, testimonies, and surveillance and satellite imagery.