Architecture that can turn detective in uncovering the truth
COUNTER INVESTIGATIONS: FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE
ICA, SW1 THIS essential-viewing survey demonstrates how architecture can turn detective. Forensic Architecture uses innovative design tools, investigative journalism and legal knowledge to puncture fake news and provide vital evidence of state abuses and human-rights violations in a post-truth age.
Based at Goldsmiths, University of London, and led by founder Eyal Weizman, FA survives on academic grants and works with Amnesty International and others. A recent case involved the far-Right murder of a migrant in a German internet café. It happened in the presence of a German government agent who denied being able to see what had happened. Forensic Architecture’s analysis, using leaked video of a police re-enactment, demonstrated that the agent wasn’t telling the truth.
Using video screens, models and large wall graphics, the ground floor of the show takes us to perilous migrant boats in the Libyan Sea and charts how drownings have increased since the UK led the charge for ending military assistance boats on the basis that drowning is a deterrence (yet the boats still come). It also shows how NGOs trying to fill the rescue gap are being accused of collusion with people smugglers. Forensic Architecture and its sister organisation Forensic Oceanography disprove Italian government charges using video and analysis of the waves and weather patterns.
Weizman argues that because of UK-led policy, “The Med is now a British shore and is the responsibility of British society. We have blood on our hands.”
The ICA’s radical history makes it, Weizman argues, one of the cultural spaces suitable for making the work public: “Truth is a common good, like water or air even if some politicians have polluted it. If you want to see art, you go to the Tate.”
Until May 6 (020 7930 3647, ica.art)