Forensic Architecture
Tools for Truth & Justice: New Ways to Investigate Human Rights Violations
Pilots Row, Rossville Street, Derry
2.30pm – 4.30pm
Chair: Trevor Birney (Journalist & film maker)
Forensic Architecture – Tools For Truth: New Ways to Investigate Human Rights Violations will take place on the afternoon of Saturday 27 January 2024 in Pilot’s Row Community Centre in Derry’s Bogside.
It will be led by Forensic Architecture (FA) and will showcase the methodologies they have developed for establishing the truth about state and corporate violence. The discussion will focus on how these tools could be deployed to address state atrocities in Ireland.
Forensic Architecture
(FA) is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London. It investigates human rights violations including violence committed by states, police forces, militaries, and corporations.
FA works in partnership with institutions across civil society, from grassroots activists to legal teams, to international NGOs and media organisations. It carries out investigations with and on behalf of communities and individuals affected by conflict, police brutality, border regimes and environmental violence.
(Image: Digital reconstruction of the first moment Shireen Abu Akleh is seen lying on the ground, not far from where journalist Shatha Hanaysha is seen hiding behind a tree. (Forensic Architecture and Al-Haq, 2022)
The investigations they undertake employ cutting-edge techniques in spatial and architectural analysis, open-source investigation, digital modelling, and immersive technologies, as well as documentary research, situated interviews, and academic collaboration.
Findings from those investigations have been presented in national and international courtrooms, parliamentary inquiries, and exhibitions at some of the world’s leading cultural institutions and in international media, as well as in citizen’s tribunals and community assemblies.
Their work on Palestine has been especially important and more about that can be seen at
https://forensic-architecture.org/location/palestine
Their more recent cases include analysis of the destruction of medical infrastructure in Gaza (2023) as well as executions and mass graves in Tantura (1948).
Distinguished journalist and film maker, Trevor Birney, who with his colleague Barry McCaffrey, was arrested by the PSNI following their documentary “No Stone Unturned”, will chair the event.
The unsolved massacre in Loughinisland in 1994, which raised questions around police collusion in the murders, can be viewed here via the link.