Forensic Architecture is a research agency that works internationally on various forms of violent crime, human rights violations and armed conflicts. Based at Goldsmiths, University of London, the team consists of experts from the fields of architecture, journalism, software, film and visual arts, among others. In most cases, they use publicly available data material for their research, for example mapping services, images and video collections, information from social networks, and journalistic-media content:
“The premise of FA is that analyzing violations of human rights and international humanitarian law (IHL) in urban, media-rich environments requires modeling dynamic events as they unfold in space and time, creating navigable 3D models of sites of conflict and the creation of animations and interactive cartographies on the urban or architectural scale.”
The spectrum of these research and visualization processes ranges, for example, from the documentation of the sinking of a boat with refugees in the middle of a sea area off the Libyan coast that was monitored by NATO at the time (The Left-to-Die Boat, 2012) about the reconstruction of the murder of Halit Yozgat in 2006 in Kassel/Germany (77sqm_9:26min, 2017) to the mapping of the forced disappearance of 43 students in Iguala, Mexico, in 2014 (The Ayotzinapa Case, 2017) .
A detailed 2017 radio feature on the Institute’s work can be found here .