How to put Forensic Architecture into context?

While Forensic Architecture’s engagement within institutional settings such as art puts pressure on the distinctions between aesthetic possibility and instrumental functionality, it is also possible to contextualise the experiential potential of their work through the infrastructural requirement for consistent and stabile designation of actors in its dynamic systems. I will attempt to develop this way of contextualising an infrastructural practice of art in the case of Forensic Architecture by sketching out how they remodel the ways in which the terms of infrastructural use are determined by indexing consistent and stable users.

Consistency, has many implications, prompts, or references — and would tie into the presentation debate had in culture — but what got met thinking of it in these terms is the recourse to legal frameworks of accountability (and claims for not being accountable) in the case of the Mediterranean migrant rescue boat MS Aquarius currently being refused disembarkation in either Malta or Italy. Both countries are claiming that they have no legal obligation to accept those rescued by the MS Aquarius: Malta since they were found in international waters near Libya coordinated by Italy; Italy, with the recent formation of the populist-hard-right in Italy, and its far right foreign minster Matteo Salvini swinging between anti-immigrant calls to ‘close the ports’ on the one hand, and tapping nationalist rhetoric that are now familiar along the ‘edges’ of the EU: that others aren’t taking on their fair share of the ‘problem,’ in this case Malta.[1] This is further complicated by a controversial pact endorsed by a number of European leaders between the Libyan coastguard and Italy, in which migrants are “pulled” or forced against their will back to Libya if they are intercepted crossing the Mediterranean (allegations that those sent back are subject to “grave human rights violations,”[2] is the basis for a lawsuit filed in the European Court of Human Rights against the deal).

In a recent major solo exhibition, “Counter Investigations,” at London’s ICA, the architecture and image-forensics research group Forensic Architecture presented material and videos relating to ongoing and past “investigations,” and research projects. These included a scale reconstruction a Kassel café and site of the murder of Turkish 21-year old, Halit Yozgat, the ninth of ten racist murders committed in Germany between 2000 and 2007 by a neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Underground. Forensic Architecture, sought to show that Andreas Temme an agent with the German domestic intelligence service, has seen the murder take place, despite his claims that he had left momentarily before. In another, The Left to Die Boat, Central Mediterranean Sea, 27 March 2011 (Investigation 2012), undertaken by a sub-‘department’ of Forensic Architecture, Forensic Oceanography, an explicative voiceover accompanies ocean tracking footage of a stalled migrant boat in the Mediterranean. The group show how it was witnessed and intercepted by other seafaring vessels, but who had refused to rescue their boat as it stalled in what NATO deemed an oceanic no-man’s-land, leaving the to drift and ultimately its occupants to die. Next to this is a harrowing, geo-located composite of a number of videos shot by activists as a Libyan coastguard ship attempts to stop a migrant rescue boat, causing one man to fall to his death, and attempting to flee the scene with another half-clothed man hanging ‘unseen’ on the side (only stopping when an Italian coastguard helicopter forces them to).

Why this might regard consistency is the extent to the which those rescued are not treated as victims or refugee (with the attendant lives and back stories this would imply). Subject to the infrastructural imaginaries shaping the surveillance of the Mediterranean, are read as legally-framed entities interfacing with the various overlapping legal maritime and border infrastructures. This renders the consistency of their presence in the infrastructural spaces created by the search and rescue/frontex jurisdictions as either rights bearing or non-bearing entities. Like this those migrants rescued are treated as users / non-users of the legal infrastructures imposed by the EU to manage its borders as externalities or intruders. In this sense, the presence of these people comes to simply index their non-rights-bearing status in the sea. In the attribution of responsibility by European politicians, the imagined space of correct infrastructural use and users seems to absolve, or enable the legislation against any collective or humanitarian responsibility on the part of the EU. And while this clearly exists as a racialised infrastructure of exclusion, resorting to treaties to define the terms of use of the sea enwraps the migrants in a legal-decision that appears to be based on their presence in those infrastructures without appropriate citizenship. Within the infrastructural imaginary of the sea as border infrastructure, this presence outside of those terms of use indexes them as non-users and so without rights. In spite of what is openly stated by La League. Here, the infrastructural as a specific as well as generalised site in which to legislate and perform the recognition of rights offers a means to consider the broader relevance of work done to bring these issues into the cultural sphere by groups such as Forensic Architecture.

Discussion about the work of Forensic Architecture often refers to an unease about how to encounter a work that makes no bones about its presentation of a “truth” — more like an “invincible dissemination of knowledge and truth” (Maria Walsh, 2018)[3] — within the institutional framework of the gallery, which has long been the site of contestation of those claims — or tries to both separate it from and tie its reception to a now standard invocation to be the ethical voice to check power (as if it is not part of it) in means according to the role of art as one of the imaginary rather than functional. As Daniel Neofetou qualifies with a quote from a review in Art Agenda by curator, Naomi Pearce “Forensic Architecture’s installations ‘fail to harness the exhibition as a sensory experience’,” and instead present what could only tenuously be considered art, with the spectator instead “positioned as an omniscient surveyor” of the presented evidence, but thankfully “on the right side of history.” (Neofetou, 2018)[4] 

But, if Forensic Architecture can be seen at the level of infrastructure operation to be repurposing is the expectation of infrastructure and its demand for consistency of what an entity indexes as they enter one infrastructure or another, then perhaps it is possible to develop a sensory description through the terminological and protocological framework of that infrastructure. For instance, if an illegalized migrant only ever need be consistently treated as an infrastructural non-user to be processed by Frontex or by within the treaty agreements shaping that infrastructural space. If in the infrastructures of state power brought into the question by Forensic Architecture and fatefully experienced by the migrants rescued by the Aquarius, entry into a border infrastructure indexes as an intrusion, the expectation for that system (in order for it to be effective) is that whatever enters maintains a consistency vis-à-vis that index — until another decision is made, if it is, about its status. An entrant is interpollated in advance and the system is not capable of registering beyond its operational parameters. Entry is an infrastructural decision (do you possess the right to enter), not an institutional one (are there common human rights to be observed). However, by the same token, that they really were there means that the EU border infrastructure really did send them to their deaths. To engage in Forensic Architecture’s work is to register this as a fact not simply a possibility.

In this sense, the barrage of “timelines, maps, digital reconstructions and video footage documenting specific results of dominant rationalism’s disregard for the particularity of human beings,” (Neofetou, 2018) in the work of Forensic Architecture, as it enters the gallery as a peculiar form of content, does indeed register a sensuousness of experience, that of registration, categorisation and consequent indifference. By registering both viewer and original actors within a shared infrastructural truth, Forensic Architecture’s work might satisfy both its requirements to be active in a legalistic and political sense as well as in an artistic space, in which, as Neofetou points out, its also expected that a work “affect the viewer as an embodied subject dependent on other subjects and objects.” That is, it begins to break the invisibility of infrastructures of information and decision that distinguish those on one side of a border from those on another.

Like all good infrastructural critiques, this broken infrastructure, is in the words of Marina Vishmidt, loquacious. As an experience then, this is not one in which art gets to “give us a glimpse of what it is that we’re fighting for,” (Neofetou, 2018), but rather one in which to enter the space of the work, its forum — an infrastructure in itself — is to become a willing or reluctant participant in the collective’s contribution, “to politics on a ‘collaborative, networked’ level.” (Eyal Weisman in Neofetou, 2018). This wouldn’t be to claim that simply stepping through the doors of the exhibition has the kind of transformative effect any Avant Gardist would have hoped for, but simply that encountering this information as an institutional object cuts it out of the infrastructural reality on which the original events and their consequences depend. Looking at this work as an object, encountering it as a political object becomes a collective task of writing or instituting it as a political problem. The discomfort with how to encounter it is the shifting of one’s own status around that of those without around a relationship to its data rather than a representation of it. In this sense the work is more simply an infrastructure around which something other than invisibility might be instituted.

Returning to the question of the reception rather than the materiality of the work of Forensic Architecture, the experience is perhaps sharpened by the lack of the compatibility of the status of an illegalized migrant has, is indexed against the status of the rights-possessing-citizen of the EU.[5] While, in an exhibition context, the presentation of the unwavering brutality of carrying out the Libya-EU pact highlights the comparative privilege of the viewer who is able to just view and the discomfort of being doing nothing but watch — but it also makes clear that for the viewer, the possession of a right is not based on a human right either. A right is removable or can become non-existent since it simply adheres to compliance with institutional agreements, or a recognition of status at the more fragile end of the scale, rather than any sense of the immutability of human rights. As an issue of infrastructure, citizenship as a condition of use becomes potentially as arbitrary as any other of the protocols that define the shuttling of infrastructure between symbolic rule and material reality, between rights and none. This precarity is as embodied and sensual as any other participatory experience you might find in a gallery.

 

notes

[1] Interestingly, and touching on the work of UCL geographer Andrew Barry, Mayors in the South of Italy (Palermo) are going against the policies of the coalition, offering to open their ports to the Aquarius. See” Wintour, Tondo, Kirchgaessner, “Southern Mayors defy Italian coalition to offer safe port to migrants,” the Guardian, Monday 11 June 2018 [online]

[2] See: Tondo, Kirchgaessner, “Italy’s deal with Libya to ‘pull back’ migrants faces legal challenge,” the Guardian, 8 May 2018 [online]

[3] See: https://www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/article/forensic-architecture-by-maria-walsh-may-2018

[4] See: https://www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/article/art-investigation-by-daniel-neofetou-june-2018

[5] The terminology of possession becomes important following shifts towards increasingly interfacial and user-center forms of citizenship, as tested out in Estonia , and outlined as a political concern by Matthew Fuller, in his chapter on Anonymity in The Posthuman Glossary…