Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTS - Forensic Investigations of Designed Destructions in 2014 Rafah, Gaza With Eyal Weizman - The FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTS - Forensic Investigations of Designed Destructions in 2014 Rafah, Gaza With Eyal Weizman - The FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTS - Forensic Investigations of Designed Destructions in 2014 Rafah, Gaza With Eyal Weizman - The FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE
FORENSIC INVESTIGATIONS OF
DESIGNED DESTRUCTIONS IN
2014 RAFAH, GAZA WITH EYAL
WEIZMAN
The editorial line of The Funambulist owes a lot to the work that Eyal Weizman has
been undertaking since 2003 in the novel approach to architecture that it has been
(2007), The Least of All Possible Evils (2011) or The Conflict Shoreline (2015, in
collaboration with Fazal Sheikh). It seemed therefore only fair that this conversation
with Weizman recorded in London on February 22, 2017 is fully transcribed on eight
etc.), this conversation mostly focuses on Palestine in general, and Rafah, Gaza in
particular.
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: There already have been plenty of interviews in which you
explain in what the work of Forensic Architecture consists; I will therefore redirect
interested to talk about here is the idea that, behind the apparent chaos of the debris
of destruction, there is a strong order and strategy that we might not be able to see
Could you tell us how the concept of “designed destruction” might address the
genealogy of Forensic Architecture? How does it involve the fact that, as you write,
so many victims of bombardments die from the building collapsing, rather than from
the bomb itself — which influences how bombs are designed to compromise
buildings in a very specific way? Could you tell us your thoughts about the notion of
designing an attack in the same way one would design an architectural project?
A residential building bearing the marks of military fire or tank shells / Courtesy of
Forensic Architecture (2017)
governance: the governance of people in space. We need to understand that the city
has to always change. So we can speak about the way in which we can read power
squares or around boulevards. But what interests me always is that the act of
space exists. It is a static space in which relations of power inhabit in particular ways,
transforms it. Because, of course, when you have an understanding of power as that
which comes through continuously rearticulated force fields, no existing static shape
can contain the flux of forces. Therefore, space and the space of the city has to be
change and transformation will have to come again. Therefore there is no immediate
ontological division between construction and destruction. We’re speaking about the
really the way in which political forces slow into form. So this is one way of looking at
the scale of the city: the shaping of the city through cutting forms through it —
cutting squares through it, cutting boulevards through it, cutting networks of nodes
With the increased precision of munition for remote fire-at-a-distance, like “smart
articulated not so much as a question of the urban but, instead, as a question of the
building itself. It goes down to the scale of the building, and through various sets of
bombings in Iraq, Gaza, Syria — starts submitting itself, not only to the question of
governing a particular population on the local level, but is interested in political and
governmental issues that are global. The global or universal dimension comes to be
applied through principles of international law and human rights. So the minute this
comes into consideration, you start having other forms of calculation that are
power. The first is distinction. Are you bombing civilians or military targets? And then
in between them there are also gray areas that the military would say are of dual use,
right? Every bridge in the city that is civilian infrastructure could be declared as dual
use because the military could also use it, and, effectively, the lawyers would
authorize its bombing. The second principle is proportionality, and that is to do really
with calculation. This is really where a certain logic that I have written about as the
logic of the lesser evil [The Least of All Possible Evils, 2011], enters into the
calculation for attacks, in which a certain balance, a certain set of limits needs to be
articulated. The calculation has to do with the question of life and death, with a
certain necroeconomy.
The example that I give is that when the US military entered into Iraq, it wanted to
finish the war, really, on the first day, it wanted to kill all the heads of the Ba’ath Party
and Saddam Hussein and his sons and Hassan al-Majid and others. But these
people were all hiding in high rise or high density parts of town, and the bombing
command to the air force planners to design the bombing in such a way that it would
course, the sacrifice of the government of other people, not their own, not people
they are accountable for. But that led to another form of calculation. The bombs
themselves become agents of design, and start sculpting out buildings, removing
floors and parts of buildings, several roofs, etc. in a way that the problem of
to sculpt out the ruin. The ruin itself becomes a product of a certain juridical
principles. They needed to know urbanistically how many people entered this
building at particular hours of the day or night, how it is held, how much glass there
is on it and how this would interact with explosives. Now the disturbing thing about
all that is that the person that was in charge of this calculation for the US military in
the run up to the American invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 was a man that later
became one of the first forensic architects. I’ve actually entered into this arena of
forensic architecture through the deepest and darkest critique: this art is a dark art; it
is an art of assassins. This guy, Marc Garlasco, has developed forensic architecture
or a breeding of buildings. Later he was a human rights analyst at the time of the
Goldstone Report [in Gaza] in 2009. He knew how to analyze the ruin and to see in it
the fossilized history, because he was a targeted assassin. And that paradox that the
reading and analysis of something is derived from, that kind of depth has inspired
and techniques that one can easily apply without deep questioning.
LL: Following up on what you called earlier a necroeconomy and addressing one
Goldsmiths, University of London, has been leading: could you tell us what
EW: 2010 was the beginning of Forensic Architecture, emerging with the deepest
year after the end of the war. Four years later, after writing a this critical essay, we end
up in the shoes of Garlasco, the person that has done the analysis in 2009 — we
now do it.
At European Pléiades image satellite captures a rare snapshot of a city under attack.
Courtesy of Forensic Architecture (2017)
In this article, I went through various problems in forensic architecture, one of them
being the implication, somehow, in the Goldstone Report that relied on the analysis
building would speak so that the human witness would remain quiet. It was already
articulated in 2010. 2014 was only five years later, but it was a different space
attack, Palestinian civil society has been successful in forcing the PA, Hamas, and
Islamic Jihad to all sign and ratify the Rome Statute. The International Court operates
very slowly, it’s very inefficient and ineffective, but it operates through a shadow, and
It has influenced to a certain extent both Palestinians and Israelis during that war.
Technologically, during that war, whereas there were smartphones and cameras in
2009, they didn’t have the level of penetration they had in the summer of 2014. There
were just a lot of cameras. Whether it was because of the ICC or other things, people
they saw happening, sometimes risking their lives to do it. So the kind of evidence
that we had — unlike Garlasco, we were not allowed in. Garlasco did a classic
consisted in 7,000 clips and images that came out of a single day in Gaza: August
1st. It’s a very different kind of evidence: a video clip that somebody shoots is
something that is between evidence and a testimony. Firstly because when people
shoot, the also speak; so you always have language and vision. Second, they are
very personal. They come from a particular perspective. They are records — both of
the persons that have taken them and the object that has been taken. Every camera
records from both sides: they record the thing that the lens is aimed at. And through
the movement, the smudges, and the blurs, they record also the person that has
taken them, although they are not photographed. But looking at blurry and fastly-
drawn images is like looking at an object through a semi-reflective glass. You see
both the subject and the object simultaneously, superimposed, one on the other.
Computer modeling of the site and event of the strike in Mir Ali, North Waziristan, on
October 4, 2010 with a survivor of the attack. /
Courtesy of Forensic Architecture (2017)
So we had these kinds of bits of evidence, which were very different from what
Garlasco had to work with. The architecture here also operated in a very different
way because we were asked to look at a particular incident of an economy of life and
death, which was one day in the Gaza war — 24 hours, 7 am on August 1st to 7 am
on August 2nd — in which a certain kind of tragedy unfolded. And that is to do with
the Israeli command called “Hannibal Directive.” It is designed for the army to avoid
the capture of one of their comrades when he or she is captured by the resistance.
Before they are taken in and out of the battlefield, the army is allowed to rescue and,
to a certain extent, kill that soldier as a better option to them being taken. The reason
for that is precisely that economy which unfolds the minute that the captive is being
taken.
Now the history of the Palestine conflict has one of the greatest dramas that always
terminology in a situation. In the beginning it was civilians in the very famous plane
hijackings. Then when Israel went into Lebanon it started to be soldiers. But the aim
was always that when you capture a person from Israel, you force Israel into a
recognition that speech would acknowledge: you are here as a subject. I can speak
to you. I must speak to you. And Israel would always say, we would never negotiate,
we would never recognize you. They did not even recognize the captured Palestinian
fighters as legitimate fighters; they were tried as criminals, and they had no chance
of being released because they were mostly tried for life. The only way to release
them was to capture an Israeli. But when an Israeli was captured, another economy
emerged, and that’s a prisoner exchange economy. So it started with several dozens
for one, then several hundred for one, and then more than a thousand for Gilad
Shalit. In an economy of human value that seemed to reflect slavery, when you trade
in lives, reminds you of, you know… Are you saying an Israeli life is worth a thousand
Palestinian lives? No, but who puts this economy? It’s the Palestinians who put the
LL: Specifically, what particularly interests me here is the economy of lives. We might
think that, back then, Hamas got “a great deal” for Gilad Shalit, because they
this deal is that one Israeli life equals 1,027 Palestinian lives. So we have the very
definition of racism operating in front of us; that one life is not equal to another life.
What’s really remarkable in the case of Black Friday and the Hannibal Directives that
you have been examining is that it is not just one life equals one life — it’s not ‘just’
soldier for him not to be kidnapped. So there’s a double perversity in this economy
— what you have called a necroeconomy earlier. Could you tell us more about this
act of killing?
EW: So, how do you kill a captured soldier? Now, obviously, if you are a resistance
fighter, you would take it into the heart of density. You would try to disappear in a
crowd. The crowd is something that cannot be bombed by any standard for
international law. So the proportionality calculation also had to shift at that moment.
When you have proportionality you calculate necessity versus adverse effects. And
you say, if there’s great necessity, we can— to make it simple— kill more people, kill
more civilians for it. If it’s less important, we can kill less. The military necessity can
only be articulated vis-a-vis military threat by international law. But the Israelis
Palestinians take a soldier and finally would be trading in the soldier for a thousand
more Palestinians, then there will be a bigger risk for Israel in the future for which we
are allowed now to kill more Palestinian civilians. The minute the Hannibal Directive
starts, the proportionality calculation shifts: it’s no longer X civilians that the military is
willing to risk and kill, but it’s (n)X or many times X. But the absurd part is that the
government could simply say, well, we don’t want to exchange. Now what’s behind
the Hannibal Directive is that the army doesn’t trust Israeli society. Israeli society is
very averse to keeping its prisoners in Palestinian hands, which is another dimension
of racism — it’s as if they were held by cannibals or savages. The army would bomb
and kill civilians and the soldier so that Israeli civil society would not be able to
trade. Effectively, it is an act between the government and the military, and no one
else. This is because the military itself or the government could simply say, that
person should stay and we’ll release one-to-one. I think that this is where the
So this economy has many levels to it, but it shows to what extent violence today is a
result of calculations. But since the event happened in an incredibly dense urban
area, that kind of evidence became crucial because everybody started taking
Another of a building that was burning. Another of a car that was destroyed, etc. You
needed to piece all that together because we needed to create and present a
situation that is not the classic situation that you have in analysis of Israeli violence
which the Palestinians tried to save an Israeli soldier and the Israeli army tries to kill
an Israeli soldier, in doing so, kills many Palestinian civilians and resistance fighters.
LL: On that case, something I find particularly interesting has to do with the broader
international trials, and how the status of artists and architects and filmmakers is
being charged against them as a non-valid expertise. Yet, part of the way you
manage to reconstitute what happened on this dreadful day of August 1, 2014 was
specifically by using artistic methods. I’m thinking here of the bomb plumes and how
understand how a cloud actually is the same in another video. There’s actually an
artistic expertise that can be used in this context. Could you please address that?
EW: Yes. First of all, although everyone dealing with forensics understands the
power and necessity of aesthetic operation both in looking at images and materials
— aesthetics in the sense of sensorium — and also in the ways your present and
represent material later in court, we also know that to present truth or fact in court, if
you refer to word “aesthetics,” you’ve already lost. Because aesthetics is mainly
understood as trickery or something that is fictional and not really the truth. Of
course, we know how hard it is to produce and how important aesthetics is in this
production. When you are not allowed to enter the “crime scene,” and that the
evidence you have are 7,000 images and clips, image practitioners are incredibly
important. When it is buildings or vegetation that you need to look at, remote sensing
multidisciplinary groups that can deal with a wide spectrum of aesthetic relations: of
memory, of image, and of matter. To each one of those material substances there is a
The particular thing that you refer to with the plumes was that our necessity was
really in looking at this flood images, the first thing is to say where and when each
one was taken. The only way to understand a narrative through so many images is
not to look at any image in isolation, but to look at the relationship between them in
time and space. Where is that in relation to this? So we try to locate them by
matching them with a perspective that we build in 3D. And we tried to establish the
time by shadow analysis. But we couldn’t do that because sometimes the shadow
was too far. Then we realized that we were looking at the wrong half of the images.
Like here, your cover of the recent The Funambulist has a half sky in it; sometimes
it’s just simply a backdrop, but we understood that in the sky, there was the physical
clock that we were looking for. We could sink up the entire battle by looking at and
mapping the clouds. For this, we needed, not a very sophisticated and contemporary
Luke Howard and John Ruskin, of a painter like Constable, and others who are
constructing all sorts of ways to triangulate clouds in the sky in order to build their
perspective of landscape painting. For us, it was in order to actually map a dynamic
landscape of cloud transformation in the air. We can time every image so that if we
see two images that have the same cloud, we say, okay, this is at the same time. Of
course, the clouds that we are talking about are not meteorological. They are bomb
clouds, but they behave like meteorological clouds. They are continuously
LL: I heard you once saying that they are pulverized buildings, pulverized
architectures.
EW: The clouds are actually everything that the building was. They are composed of
brick, plaster, wood, glass, building remains, human remains… all of that becomes
this cotton wool that exists in the air for eight to ten minutes. In a sense, one could
think about it as architecture in gas form. If you like, that is the form of destruction.
You can look at the hard ruin on the ground, but in this project we were looking at
the soft, temporary ruin in the air. But, I have to say that the architecture of bomb
clouds represent something fundamental about all architecture — except for the fact
that we needed the tools of blob architecture and parametric design in order to
understand the interaction of air and pressure with form. They are the extreme case
of the temporariness of elasticity of the relationship between force and form. Clouds
are the manifestation of political plastic that I started to speak about at the beginning.
All buildings are temporary. Politics operate on the form by their continuous
transformation. Here you have a form that is a diagram of the forces around it. When
we sync up the sky, we simply inverted the entire landscape and looked at a part of
the earth. What was very distinct in this investigation was that the civilians were
interviewed. The anchors in their memories were the bombs. They were telling us the
stories from underneath those clouds. To a certain extent, then, the clouds brought
matter — the building, material, image as in the videos and satellite images and
photographs of the clouds — and memory. It is like a hinge that connected all the
sense, they become almost a heideggerian object that pulls the worlds together, the
Computer modeling of the site and event of the strike in Mir Ali, North
Waziristan / Courtesy of Forensic Architecture (2017)
LL: This gives me a good segue towards my last question, which looks more
prosopopoeia, i.e. “the speech of things.” How do you make buildings speak but,
also, how do you make speech become buildings, which is also something you do
EW: I think that there has been a certain misunderstanding that somehow plagues
our history. It seems like we have replaced the human with the materiality of the
object. I see by your question that you don’t understand it in that way, but I wanted
to make it clear that, for us, forensic architecture is a move that always exists
between subject and object. Forensics animate the object and objectifies the
subject. It creates a certain zone between them that is part human, part nonhuman.
This is the gray area in which we operate. It does not interest us simply to look at
objects, and we do not feel that we have something to contribute in simply speaking
about the memory of the subject. For us, the fertile zone is that ambiguity, where
skulls and buildings start to speak, and when people start to remember through
engagement with objects — whether they are material objects or buildings; whether
at maps. What has happened between the piece of evidence that never speaks for
itself and the person, either the expert or the witness, that is somehow pulled into the
object and then something else happens. This is the area in which we operate: this
kind of overlap between object and subject. You put it very beautifully when you said
operates both in the animating of material objects, making them speak. On the other
hand, this inverse prosopopoeia allows the creation of an object through speech.
Courtesy of Forensic Architecture (2017)
part of our bandwidth — is creating evidence from memory, creating evidence from
they could, they would restrict the flow of images, but they cannot. In Gaza, for
example, what they managed to restrict is access to the materiality of the ruin. They
did not manage to restrict access to the media and memory. We could even remotely
communicate with people. Sometimes the Assad regime in Syria is able to restrict
both media and material evidence. Remember the three categories: material, media,
and memory. What you’re left with is only memory. How do you use memory to
construct architecture? And how do you use architecture to induce memory? These
are two processes we do when we work with people who have experienced
practice by which the witnesses and sometimes victims would build a model of
where they’ve been. What is much more interesting for us is how the process of
building something, how the very mundane measurements — of floor tiles, hatches,
doors, heights, ceilings, level of moisture, sound — can, all of a sudden, trigger
memories that were otherwise repressed. Witnesses to trauma might remember a lot
of things before a traumatic moment and after, but there’s something about violence
sometimes, and sometimes not: it’s an indeterminate process. But it increases the
rendering of space, but actually builds that space… sometimes at the moment where
somebody describes the size of tiles and how many tiles were in a room, a memory
of a form of torture that was extremely repressive or hard, was articulated. It all of
sudden returned. Another witness that we asked to model a door, simply by the
measurement of the door recalled the form of torture that was otherwise
between object and subject. Obviously, that zone between object and subject can be
captured and inhabited by media. If you remember, media, subjectivity, and the
Transcript by Amrit Trewn / Find the audio version of this conversation online in
thefunambulist.net.
Eyal Weizman is an architect, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, and Director
books include Mengele’s Skull (with Thomas Keenan at Sterenberg Press, 2012),
Evils (Nottetempo 2009, Verso 2011), Hollow Land (Verso, 2007), A Civilian
SUBSCRIBE
CATEGORIES
Select Category
info@thefunambulist.net The Funambulist EURL,75 rue du Cherche Midi, 75006 Paris, FRANCE