Conversation: Architecture, Violence, Evidence

Author(s): Eyal Weizman and Andrew Herscher

Source: Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism
, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Summer 2011), pp. 111-123
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
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1.  Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch (HRW) pointing at a slide of the aerial bombing that killed the Palestinian minister of the
interior (Gaza) during Israel’s 2008–9 attack on Gaza. The presentation was delivered at the Human Rights Project (HRP) at Bard
College in 2010. Photo courtesy Eyal Weizman.

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Conversation
Eyal Weizman and Architecture, Violence, Evidence
Andrew Herscher

Architect Eyal Weizman and historian Andrew Herscher dis-

cuss their research on architecture as a target of political
violence and the consequent interpretation(s) of architec-
tural destruction in international law. The act of destruc-
tion fundamentally transforms the meaning of a building,
and often architecture only acquires significance at the
very moment of its destruction. Their discussion reveals
the complexity of meaning surrounding architecture as
both victim and witness, and challenges the too-­frequent
assumption that buildings ever only serve as static sym-
bols of identity.

wei z man : Let us start with architectural evidence. In a large

­ roject that the Centre for Research Architecture now under-
p
takes for the EU, we have coined the term “forensic architec-
ture” to reflect upon the way in which architecture functions
as evidence of violations in international humanitarian law but
also in other political and media forums. Can you tell me about
the research you undertook with Andras Riedlmayer in Kosovo
in 1999 and 2000?

andrew herscher: The project was initiated when the Hague

Tribunal asked us to research one of their planned indictments
against Slobodan Miloševi ć and his codefendants in the Kosovo
case, which was an indictment for persecution on political,
religious, or racial grounds. One aspect of this persecution
involved the deliberate destruction of mosques. Andras and I
went to Kosovo to investigate this destruction, but we ended up
broadening the brief of our investigation to look at the destruc-
tion of different sorts of architecture as well, such as other
religious buildings, like churches and historic monuments. We
discovered that, indeed, mosques and other building types were
systematically targeted during the counterinsurgency against
the Kosovo Liberation Army. We also found that the narrative
that was staged by the Serb government—that these build-
ings were damaged by NATO bombs—was in most cases highly
unlikely because of the way that the buildings were damaged,
often from the interior by dynamiting or by violence precisely
directed against specific parts of the building, like minarets.
Future Anterior
Volume VIII, Number 1 For me, though, our documentation project also fore-
Summer 2011 grounded, at least implicitly, some of the limits of ­apprehending

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2.  Mosque, Reti e Poshtme/Donje architecture in the way the Hague Tribunal did. One limit is that
Retimlje, Kosovo, photographed in
the tribunal’s axis of interpretation always leads to the question
October 1999 by Andrew Herscher.
of authorial responsibility. It’s always a person who is being
indicted, so evidence is always being interpreted to point either
to that person’s guilt or innocence. When the primary ques-
tion is whether a defendant is responsible for a crime against
architecture, essentially an auteur theory of architecture results;
architecture is the product of an author’s intentions rather than
an ensemble of individual, collective, and nonhuman forces
and dynamics. This is as problematic in the case of destruction
as it is the case of construction. In the Hague Tribunal, prosecu-
tors tried to articulate the chain of command that transmitted
Miloševi ć’s intentions to his forces on the ground in Kosovo,
which were doing things like destroying mosques. But this
intention was but one element in the complex structure that
bore upon architecture during the Serb counterinsurgency in
Kosovo; there, as elsewhere, architecture’s identity was at least
overdetermined by a constellation of forces that compromised
authorial intention.
Another limitation has to do with the way that the tribunal
sees violence as an instrument apprehended by subjects who
know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. This assump-
tion is denied by any rigorous way of understanding subjectivity
and identity. Indeed, when you look closely at destruction during
the counterinsurgency in Kosovo, as I tried to do in my book,
Violence Taking Place, what you see is not so much Serbs commit-
ting violence against Albanians but rather people c­ ommitting

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3.  Mosque, Prilep/Prilep, Kosovo, violence to performatively claim Serbian identity and to
photographed in October 1999 by
performatively impose an Albanian identity on their human
Andrew Herscher.
and architectural targets. Yet, while this performative dimen-
sion of identity was played out in destruction and other kinds
of violence, this dimension was ignored in the Hague ­Tribunal
because it simply had no bearing on innocence or guilt.
The idea, also subscribed to in the tribunal, that archi-
tecture has a singular and objective meaning — so that what
was in dispute in Kosovo was not what architecture is but who
destroyed it — this is also something that is hard to sustain.

ew : How do you mean this?

ah : Well, in the Hague Tribunal, the idea was that the Serbs
and Albanians and everybody else agreed on what architec-
ture is. For example, Serbs and Albanians were supposed to
share a sense of mosques as a symbol of Albanian identity,
so that Serbs could destroy mosques as a proxy for destroy-
ing ­Albanians themselves. I would argue that, in fact, it was
not clear at all what a mosque was. There were many ways to
understand a mosque and many ways to relate mosques to
Kosovar Albanian collective identity. Most Kosovar Albanians
were Muslim in name only, and relatively few of them went
to mosques. I see the destruction of mosques, then, more
as a way of endowing a particular sort of identity on Kosovar
­Albanians than of wreaking violence on a preexisting and
stable sign of that identity; this destruction was semiotic as
well as violent.

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 ew : This reminds me of a certain, perhaps analogous, case
concerned with your point about the way structures might
acquire their meaning only at the moment of their destruc-
tion. After large parts of the Jenin Camp were destroyed by
the Israeli ­military in the spring of 2002 I interviewed some
residents there. The rebuilding of the camp by international
agencies sponsored by the UAE was itself as controversial. For
one thing — the camp was rebuilt with the roads wide enough
to a
­ llow tanks to drive through without smashing into walls —
which is what accounted for some of the battle destruction.
The insurance company would simply not insure the rebuilding
project if it was to be destroyed again by tanks driving in, but
by this process of urban design they actually invited them in.
One can say that the bank made the tank the measure of urban
design. . . . The other indicative issue was that many Palestin-
ians said that it was only with its destruction that the camp
was accepted as home. You are very familiar with the logic that
poses the refugee camp as temporary and thus not a home; its
temporariness, performed architecturally by a certain mode of
employing details and finishes, is what maintains the memory
of displacement. If the camps are destruction, the destruction
of the camp is the destruction of destruction. Which could
simultaneously mean a kind of redemptive belief in the end of
disaporic life or nostalgia for the home that is now lost. When
the UAE financed the rebuilding and urbanization of the camp
and the rebuilding of some homes, some people were saying
“now we have lost the right of return.” I do not believe that im-
provement of the camp has anything to do with a political right.
I do not agree with the political commissars that seek to keep
the camp in its position of misery in order to make a point. The
right of return is a political right — when it can be exercised —
and not a solution to a socioeconomic or architectural-­urban
problem, but this is another matter.

ah : I think that’s a very salient story because it shows how vio-

lence doesn’t simply target architecture that possesses a fixed
meaning and identity; rather, violence transforms the meaning
and identity of architecture in the very process of destroying it.
This transformation takes place throughout architecture’s circu-
lation across interpretive communities and discursive contexts.
For example, the prosecution in the Hague Tribunal posed the
destruction of mosques in Kosovo as a destruction of heritage.
In many cases, though, it was destruction itself that rendered
buildings as heritage, because these buildings had far less or
even no historic value before they were destroyed. For me this
is an interesting issue in the case of forensic architecture —­
architecture employed as evidence in a legal context — because
it means that forensic architecture has to be attentive to the

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4.  Mosque, Samadrexhë/Samodraûa, way that it changes its object of study in the very process of
Kosovo, photographed in October 1999
­apprehending architecture as such. In other words, the framing
by Andrew Herscher.
of architecture as evidence, especially in a juridical context,
adds new layers to architecture’s identities, meanings, and
functions. Forensics does not simply make available an exter-
nal view onto architecture.

ew : What is interesting about the possibilities of forensic archi-

tecture is that it is a kind of historical practice related to archi-
tecture that is conceptually completely outside of the epistemic
frame of architectural history. Rather than to the human agent,
forensic architecture needs to be tuned to the history of materials,
surfaces, structures, and form, to their interaction and their
failure. These hold clues as to the event that led to destruction—
and this event might have a legal implication such as in ques-
tions regarding when a building was destroyed from the air or
from the ground — but also for much more subtle events that
could be registered in materials. Sometimes extremely subtle
transformations, such as minute ones in the surface of build-
ings, are inadvertent traces. The skins of buildings are complex
membranes registering minute transformation in environmen-
tal conditions as much as abrupt events. Not long ago we were
both speaking to Jorge Otero-­Pailos about building pathol-
ogy — and it seems to me that this might be central. ­Materials
like concrete plaster and other exposed surfaces make intense
dynamic microtopographies that might register transformation/
processes in relation to humidity, temperature, air quality,
salination, changes in patterns of use, and sometimes also
the abrupt or violent events that happen next to them. The
key is to understand that the first millimeters of buildings are

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5.  Bazaar, Pejë/Peć, Kosovo, sensors: air bubbles trapped in paint and cracks could be read
photographed in October 1999 by
as the result of contradiction in the environmental forcefields
Andrew Herscher.
around them.
The problem of analyzing a complex and multivalent event
from the heaps of rubble in which it is inscribed depends on
the interaction of structural engineering chemistry and blast
engineering. I am interested in the way in which, in these
cases, the scientist and the engineer are functioning as archae-
ologists of recent history. Although, of course, no matter is fully
transparent to this form of historical investigation.
In my previous book, Hollow Land, I used the term “politi-
cal plastic” to describe the way in which the elastic spaces of
the frontier — roads, barriers, colonies, military bases — register
in their layout and form the forcefield around them. If you think
of space as a political plastic, you can trace a certain rela-
tionship between forces and forms; for example, the kind of
ever-­mutating, ever-­changing, temporary, and elastic borders
thrown up by the Israeli occupation: the wall that constantly
changes its path like a mad serpent, the settlements that are
sometimes evacuated and then often appear in other places,
the ever-­changing system of roadblocks and checkpoints. This
constant elasticity of the frontier means that space as a politi-
cal plastic bears the imprint of political forces as they slow into
form. But it is not right to think of dead matter imprinted by
forces, but on vibrant materiality that resists in different ways,
that has its own agency, so to speak. When you come from that
kind of understanding of materiality, “forensic” has another

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 meaning. It is not the study of a dead body but of a living one
coiling under pain.

ah : What’s interesting to me is the particular status of the court

as a reader of inscriptions that emerge from violence against
architecture and the degree to which law can get at that com-
plex play of actors and forces that you’re describing. What con-
cerns me about the court as a reader is the way that the law is
always premised upon certain sorts of procedures, actors, and
outcomes. The law tries individuals, for example; it does not try
institutions, ideologies, historical structures, or social dynam-
ics but rather invokes the preceding as contextual truths. What
happens, then, in the case of an architectural forensics, when
architecture is moved outside of the interpretive context of his-
tory and into the court’s interpretive context of law?

ew : Here is an example of what might happen: the trial involv-

ing the West Bank Wall in 2003–4 in the Israeli High Court of
Justice, and at the ICJ in The Hague. What is interesting about
this case is that the wall did not function in it as a piece of evi-
dence to the alleged action of human actors but that the trial
was a trial of the wall. I mean the wall was on trial. The ques-
tion asked was whether the route was proportional — which
means — did it sufficiently balance “security” against human
rights infringement. In this trial the spatial representation of
the wall and its environment were central. When the judges
realized they could not read the drawings presented to them
they asked for models — like you’d ask an architectural student.
The human rights team produced a model. When this model
was called in, the legal teams assembled around it and the
legal process started to resemble a planning session, with the
parties each making their proposals on the model as if they
were planners — this included also the human rights team.
Legal protocols were discarded, there was no longer any refer-
ence to terms such as “your honor” or “my learned colleague.”
There was no “order.” So I think that the model instigated a
process; it was like a participant. What instead transpired was
a process that I call “forensic engineering” — the tuning of the
apparatus — within the arena of the law; the legal teams were
designing the wall right there in court. That’s the kind of elas-
ticity that I’m talking about. You should be able to see in the
path of the wall a diagram of micropolitical forces. It becomes
this very frustrating process because the price of this elastic-
ity is that the wall got legitimized in court, also by the human
rights team.

ah : In that case: is the wall more accurately posed as the

­defendant of the crime, or the evidence of the crime?

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6.  Model used in the Beit Surik vs.
the Ministry of Defence court case of
2003–4, as it sat in the offices of the
human rights lawyer, Mohamad Dahla,
petitioning the case in 2008. The
model was the first one built of the wall
and was manufactured by a modeling
service also used by the military.
Some on this model represent the wall
according to the Ministry of Defence,
while other lines represent the less
evil wall proposed by the human rights
team. Photo courtesy of Eyal Weizman.
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ew : Perhaps one can say that the wall was the defendant, the
evidence, and the crime.
ah : If the wall was defendant, evidence, and crime all at once,
then it certainly throws into question the protocols of the law
that was invoked to judge it, because this law, as constituted,
cannot deal with architecture operating in these multiple
ways. In June 2010, when Andras Riedlmayer was testifying at
the Hague Tribunal about the destruction of mosques during
the war in Bosnia, the lawyers for the defendant started to
question his particular expertise to testify on this destruction
because he didn’t have a degree in art history — itself a very
interesting presumption of architectural expertise — nor any
architectural background. The lawyers were raising the ques-
tion: Who can speak on behalf of architecture? What sort of
expertise is adequate to establish someone as an interlocutor
for architecture in the court of law?
ew : When Riedlmayer was cross-­examined by Milošević, who
represented himself in this process, Milošević raised that very
question. Milošević, having proposed a different reading of the
same pile of rubble in Kosovo — that it was created not by his
forces but by a NATO bomb — claimed that what was needed
was ballistic and blast engineers; again, he insisted that the
frame is material analysis. His was a manipulative and cynical
move — and I have no sympathy with him — but it raises some
questions about what is the meaning of the different frames of
analysis that could be applied in this case.
7.  Christine Cornell and Eyal Weizman,
artistic rendering of the lawyers and
judges in Jerusalem’s High Court of
Justice debating over a topographic
model the path that the West Bank
Wall should take. During the Beit
Surik vs. the Ministry of Defence court
case of 2003–4. Pastel on paper. A3
(2008). Courtesy of Eyal Weizman and
Manifesta 6, Trento.
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ah : It’s still an open question: what expertise is adequate to
testify for architecture or even, in effect, as architecture? There
seems to be no established answer. The story that you told
about the wall in the Israeli court poses the same question —
it breaks open all the established modes of expertise that allow
someone to speak as a witness. So, just as architecture enters
the space of law in a number of different contexts, the kind of
expertise necessary to talk about this architecture has not yet
been instituted.
Nevertheless, architecture is consistently being talked
about in contexts where political violence is not only judged
but also inflicted. While military forces consistently frame the
destruction they inflict in instrumental terms — so that archi-
tecture is destroyed as a locus of usually technical functions —
there are symbolic, expressive, and ideological dimensions
also at play in their architectural violence. Indeed, whenever
the killing of human beings is to some degree problematic and
therefore necessary to legitimize, militaries can always stage
architecture as a target for acceptable violence, a violence that
renders the inevitable deaths that occur along with it as mere
collateral damage. You can go back to Hiroshima, which the
U.S. military and government framed as an attempt to destroy
the housing of workers in war industries. Even then, architec-
ture was invoked as a wholly legitimate target for destruction,
the primary object of a violence whose seemingly secondary
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 “side effect” was the deaths of workers, their families, and, of
course, many others inhabiting the city.
I think that there’s a continuous line between this architec-
tural legitimization of radical violence and the recent precision
bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the deaths that inevi-
tably occurred with the dropping of bombs were also framed as
collateral damage. Of course, there’s actually nothing collateral
about those deaths; they were precisely calculated so that
architectural violence served to justify a particular calculus of
death as well as of destruction.
The other thing that is really interesting to me is your
term “nonhuman witness,” which raises a question about the
relationship of nonhuman and human testimony. Nonhuman
testimony can displace the testimony of humans because it is
often endowed with an objectivity, a mechanized neutrality.
This endowment represses the way that nonhuman things, in
the guise of “witnesses,” are just as socially constructed, just
as discursive as the trembling voice of a survivor of an atrocity.
We just don’t tend to see this construction or discursivity when
we’re talking about material things.

ew : The shift of emphasis in war crimes and human rights,

from human testimony to material forensics investigation,
has meant that science has begun invading some of the legal
and cultural grounds previously reserved for the testimonies
of h
­ uman witnesses. When Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub
referred to the last decades of the twentieth century as “the
era of the testimony,” they meant the increased engagement
with the written, recorded, filmed, and exhibited testimony of
the Holocaust. In recent times, trauma and memory studies
have turned testimony into something with strong political
power. Different forms of testimony became prominent in truth
commissions, human rights, and humanitarian work but also in
the general media and online archives. These had also the side
effect of sometimes reducing political actors to “survivors.”
Testimony was not only epistemic — in the sense of construct-
ing knowledge — but had an ethical role within this era. Ethical
rather than epistemic, its function was primarily in being
delivered.
Throughout the 1990s there was a series of international
tribunals established for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda.
They were followed by the permanent international tribunal
of the International Criminal Court. This “legalization” meant
that the function of testimony changed from being an emotive
or ethical stance in public address to a legal status needing
now to withstand cross-­examination. Many witnesses testify-
ing at the ICTY were not ready for the adversarial nature of the

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 proceedings. The courts also led to a shift of emphasis from
testimony to evidence, from speech to medical data, from the
accounts of living people to the testimony of forensic anthro-
pologists, if you wish.
The difference between a witness and a piece of evidence
is that evidence is presented, while a witness is interrogated.
However, the legal process already tends to blur this distinc-
tion when it demands that the witness approximates objec-
tivity, while the presentation of evidence for contemporary
forms of cross-­examination and interrogation have granted
some objects some traits of subjectivity inconsistency and
­contradiction.
Forensics is etymologically derived from the space of the
forum, which—unlike the temple in a classic polis—is the place
where truth is constructed rather than granted. In this ­forum
things are debated. In this forum not only humans but also
things can speak as long as they have an interpreter that trans-
lates from the language of objects to that of humans. Today the
scientist expert witness is the interpreter and the translator. But
in forensics the problem of the objects recreates something of
the problematics of the subject delivering testimony.

ah : This raises the question of the politics of material witness-

ing, especially insofar as the kinds of material witnesses that
can be objectified tend to be very technologized. I’m thinking
now of satellite imagery, which tends to be available to and
interpreted by very corporatized and scientized communities
of experts. Moreover, the use of satellite imagery by the human
rights community to defend human rights claims tends to show
architecture instead of human beings themselves. There’s an
effort to use satellite images of architecture, that is, to speak
on behalf of human beings who are purportedly silent, furtive,
or invisible. There are many aporias captured by satellites in
the scenes of architecture before and after a human rights
violation has taken place, and these aporias structure human
rights advocacy as well as the work of international criminal
courts and tribunals. To what degree does the material witness
and its interlocutors speak on behalf of human rights victims
and to what degree do they speak instead of these victims? If
it’s the second case, then what stories are being told and what
stories are not being told?

ew : People, especially in the human rights community, believe

that science would dispel the doubt attached to testimony. But
as we see, forensic evidence reproduces some of the problems
of the witness — objects that tell different stories, that the read-
ing could be politically biased.

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 The entire discussion of testimony in the context of
humanitarian organizations was an attempt to politicize this
practice, to take the side of oppressed people against military
or state governments that cause the “humanitarian situation”
in the first place. Humanitarians tended to be speaking on
behalf of victims. For example, Doctors without Borders goes
to places and insists not only on being professional medical
doctors but also bearing witness. It always faced that criticism
of aestheticizing, manipulating, superseding, or ventiloquizing
the voice of the victim. We are only now starting to realize what
a politics and ethics of the forensic turn might be. Is it that the
voice of the witness was silenced by technology, or is it that we
now simply have more to listen to?

ah : In terms of adding more voices and adding more protocols

of witnessing, I wonder if these additions work like Derridian
supplements. In other words, to what degree is the material
witness a simple addition to the field of testifying actors and
to what degree does it work like a supplement? The supple-
ment, Derrida pointed out, not only adds on to something but
actually renders what it is added onto incomplete; it has to
create a space for itself in order to function as a supplement
in the first place. It seems to me that the introduction of the
material witness doesn’t simply make available one more
testifying object but also changes the nature of all testifying
objects. The introduction of architecture into the field of human
rights advocacy, especially through the recent use of satel-
lite imagery, thus becomes a kind of supplementation of the
human witness, a witness that is now no longer able to testify
as a verifying, conclusive authority. Now the testimony of the
human witness invokes the material witness to verify what she
says. The human witness has become supplemented — in an
almost classically Derridian sense — by the material witness,
a very interesting and also problematic phenomenon.

ew : Or one can also think it through with Rancière: we cannot

take the possibility of communication for granted. The political
being the rearrangement of the sensible, which is the ability
to change the definition of what counts as speaking at all or to
invent the scene upon which speech may be audible or objects
visible. The object, nonhuman witness, reconfigures the nature
of what testimony and speech means. I see in our discussion
two directions: one is a kind of a nightmare in which a cybor-
gian and robotic objective reality is superseding the human,
and the other is in the world of vibrant materiality, which is a
way forward to comprehend how materials and humans inter-
act with each in ever-­novel ways.

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 ah : Maybe that’s a very appropriate way to end this conversa-
tion, with a promise on the one hand and a threat on the other.
Perhaps Rancière articulates the promise, the expansion of
the human sensorium to include the testimony of the material
thing. Derrida reciprocally articulates the threat introduced
by the testimony of material things, a threat to the human’s
always already fragile and compromised capacities, agen-
cies, and potentials. The material witness, as you point out, is
transformative in ways that cannot be predicted or managed
in advance; it introduces displacements, negations, and even
violence in the very process of articulating its own truths about
violence.
Biographies
Eyal Weizman is currently director of the Centre for Research Architecture at
Goldsmiths, University of London, and of the EU-­funded research project Forensic
Architecture. Since 2007 he is a founding member of the architectural collective
Decolonizing Architecture in Beit Sahour/Palestine, which aims to “mobilize archi-
tecture as a tactical tool in political intervention.”
Andrew Herscher’s work explores the architectural forms of political violence,
cultural memory, collective identity, and human rights, particularly in the Balkans.
He has worked for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the
United Nations Mission in Kosovo, and the Kosovo Cultural Heritage Project. His
book, Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict, was published
in 2010. He is currently an associate professor at the University of Michigan.

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