Investigative Commons

The investigative non-profit research agencies Forensic Architecture and Forensis are working together with the Nama Traditional Leaders Association (NTLA) and the Ovaherero Traditional Authority (OTA) to retrieve the historical evidence of the first genocide of the 20th century, in which thousands of Nama and Ovaherero were murdered by the German colonial army between 1904 and 1908 in contemporary Namibia. The presentation at HAU1will focus on their investigations of central sites of genocidal atrocities: the concentration camps on Shark Island and in Swakopmund.

Shark Island is the site of a former concentration camp where over 4.000 people were imprisoned and killed. Not only is it currently buried under a tourist camp site, but its character as a place of remembrance and memorialisation is further endangered by a large-scale industrial development project with German support. Next to Shark Island the town of Swakopmund is another site of colonial atrocities: it bears evidence of a further concentration camp located at its center, alongside various sites of forced labour, and reveals the violent encroachment of urban development over the unmarked graves of genocide victims. The projects on Shark Island and Swakopmund emphasize the importance of preserving and commemorating these historical sites. Their erasure threatens the collective memory that connects Germany, Namibia, and the Nama and Ovaherero peoples.

The cases will be presented through two investigative films followed by a panel discussion with international guests; amongst others with Johannes Ortmann from the NTLA, the curator and expert on German colonial history Ibou Diop, Zeit journalist Andrea Böhm and Forensis senior researcher Mark Mushiva. The discussion will focus on questions of cultural heritage, recognition of colonial crimes, and the much-needed re-opening of the discussion about the shared culture of remembrance and legal responsibility.

The films “Shark Island” and “Swakopmund” have been produced by Forensis and Forensic Architecture in collaboration with the Nama Traditional Leaders Association (NTLA), and the Ovaherero Traditional Authority (OTA).

The bombing of the Mariupol Drama Theatre on March 16, 2022, a few weeks after the beginning of the Russian all-out invasion, is one of the worst atrocities committed by the occupying power against the civilian population. This latest joint research by the Kyiv-Berlin based Center for Spatial Technologies and Berlin-based Forensis focuses on the three-week period between the start of the large-scale Russian invasion and the March 16 air strike. During this period, the theater became a self-organized commune and an act of resistance: a “city within a building.” Through hours of interviews with survivors of the attack, the living world of the theater is carefully reassembled, exploring with great sensitivity the emerging interactions of memory, space, and trauma.

Presentation by the Center for Spatial Technologies with Maksym Rokmaniiko, Svitlana Matviyenko, Kseniia Rybak, and Isabelle Haßfurther. In English with simultaneous translation into German.

In 1893 the German Schutztruppen attacked the Witbooi Nama settlement of ||Nâ‡gâs, also known as Hornkranz, in German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia). This was the beginning of a genocidal campaign against the Herero and Nama peoples that reached its peak between 1904 and 1908. This project, led by the Nama Traditional Leaders Association (NTLA) and the Ovaherero Traditional Authority (OTA), seeks to uncover traces of the genocide buried within the Namibian environment but present in the hearts of its affected communities within the transformed physical environment, climate, vegetation, and the oral tradition of its peoples. 

Inherited Testimonies is a live performance of culturally inherited, collective testimonies, delivered by traditional leaders, and oral historians within a continuously transformed visual and auditory immersive environment – a large projection of evolving architectural and environmental scenes – conceived by Forensic Architecture/Forensis. 

The words of traditional witnesses are delivered within and in relation to space, activated by their relation to body, and screen. The testimonies are delivered as an act of collective construction of an environment, as a form of ‘world building’ and navigating within it. 

The meaning of the landscape is gradually revealed as it gets inhabited with structures, objects, indigenous plants, and archival images. 

Contesting the western legal contexts in which testimony is an institutionally regulated and circumscribed act, the event offers a form of immersive, situated, oral, trans-generational testimony and inhabits a space of trauma that is diffuse, continuous, collective, and cumulative. 

This interaction is an attempt to reconstruct lost sites of atrocity such as the extermination camp in Shark Island and the massacre of Hornkranz as well as the lost world—an environment transformed by colonial violence and the theft of Indigenous land.

The bombing of the Mariupol Drama Theatre on 16 March 2022, in the early weeks of the Russian invasion, was one of worst atrocities against civilians committed by the occupying forces. But what was destroyed there, and in the following months, was not only the fabric of a theatre building. Up to two thousand civilians found shelter in the building and turned it into an architectural-scale city with places for debate, shelter, and mutual care. Until the machinery of the Russian occupiers bulldozed it, the building was also evidence of a grave war crime.

The latest joint investigation by the Kyiv-based Center for Spatial Technologies and the Berlin-based Forensis explores the three weeks between the start of the Russian full-scale invasion and the airstrike of 16 March. During this time, the theatre became a self-organised commune and an act of resistance: a “City Inside a Building”. The lecture narrates the building‘s history as a historical site of cultural identity. Through hours-long interviews with survivors of the attack, the life-world of the theatre is painstakingly reassembled while the evolving interactions between memory, space, and trauma are sensitively explored.

Taking this collaborative work as a starting point, Weizman and Rokmaniko will explore the tensions between evidence and testimony through what the agencies call “situated testimony”, where witnesses design and walk through a three-dimensional model of the building. The lecture will also address the nature of their collaborative investigative practice, developed through Forensic Architecture, which supported this investigation, the practices and difficulties of preserving evidence in wartime, and the complexities of working, investigating, and interviewing under the shadow of conflict.

On 16 March 2023 the Center for Spatial Technologies (CST) will publish the first chapter of their work on the 2022 airstrike on the Mariupol theatre, in collaboration with Forensis and supported by Forensic Architecture. The launch will feature a short film – ‘A City within a Building’ – and an online ‘archive’, making public a set of previously unseen materials from Mariupol, including 3D models, photos, digital ‘artefacts’, testimonies, and videos produced in collaboration with more than 20 survivors of the attack.

To coincide with this launch, following a premiere event in Kyiv, CST director Maksym Rokmaniko and Forensic Architecture/Forensis director Eyal Weizman will deliver a multi-part lecture introducing the project and screening the film, followed by a discussion.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has led to an unprecedented array of accountability initiatives for the crimes committed in this ongoing war of aggression. Both state institutions and civil society across the world have taken action to investigate and examine atrocities in Ukraine.

To learn more about how human rights organizations have approached the fight for justice, together with our guests, we want to explore existing efforts in addressing these crimes and discuss the challenges and differences compared to international crimes committed elsewhere. In this context, we particularly focus our discussion on how to combine the complementary aspects of open source investigation and strategic case building to increase the impact of civil society collaborations and interventions.

Вторгнення Росії в Україну у лютому 2022 року призвело до появи безпрецедентної кількості ініціатив, спрямованих на забезпечення притягнення до відповідальності за злочини, скоєні під час цієї триваючої агресивної війни. Як державні установи, так і громадянське суспільство у всьому світі вживають заходів задля проведення розслідування і дослідження звірських злочинів в Україні.

Щоб дізнатися більше про те, як правозахисні організації реалізують заходи з боротьби за правосуддя, разом із нашими гостями ми хочемо дослідити існуючі зусилля, спрямовані на реагування на ці злочини, та обговорити виклики і труднощі, у порівнянні з міжнародними злочинами, скоєними в інших місцях. У цьому контексті в ході цього обговорення ми зосереджуємо особливу увагу на тому, як поєднувати взаємодоповнюючі аспекти розслідувань на основі даних із відкритих джерел та стратегічної підготовки справ, щоб посилити вплив співпраці громадянського суспільства та їхніх ініціатив.

It is nearly three years since nine people were murdered in a racist terror attack in Hanau. It is nearly eighteen years since Oury Jalloh was burnt to death in a police cell in Dessau. The victims’ families, friends and the survivors are still struggling for accountability.

Separating and connecting different domains – state, public and private – doors are physical objects but also social contracts. The exhibition presents three investigations, each concerned with a door, unraveling different aspects of racist violence in Germany: In Hanau, it is the locked emergency exit door of the Arena Bar and the front door of the perpetrator’s house through which the police failed to pursue him. In Dessau, it is the door of the police cell in which Oury burnt to death. Closed when they needed to be broken through, open when they needed to be shut and locked when they needed to be unlocked, these doors embody a failure of the social order; to understand how, these investigations reconstruct the larger context around them, illuminating long-lasting and troubling relationships between racist perpetrators and state agencies in Germany.

Since its first presentation at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Three Doors has directly influenced the ongoing responses to the Hanau terror attack in politics, society and the media. Now, the exhibition, along with guided tours and a public program, draws upon the experiences of relatives, survivors and supporters to give visibility to their continuing struggle – and to shed light on deeply entrenched racist structures within Germany – just a stone’s throw from the German federal parliament.

The exhibition Three Doors by Forensic Architecture/Forensis, Initiative 19. Februar Hanau and Initiative in Gedenken an Oury Jalloh was co-produced with Frankfurter Kunstverein.

With Initiative 19. Februar Hanau, Forensic Architecture, family members, survivors

Meeting point: box office
Free admission, with registration

Language: In German
Registration via Threedoors@hkw.de

• Sun, Nov 20, 2022 at 3pm
• Sun, Nov 27, 2022 at 3pm
• Sun, Dec 11, 2022 at 3pm
• Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 3pm

Between 1904 and 1908, German imperial forces perpetrated the first genocide of the 20th century in then German South-West Africa, involving the targeted ‘extermination’ of large numbers of Ovaherero, Ovambanderu and Nama people and the killing of many others. The conference presents the initial stage of ongoing collaborative research and discusses the effects of these colonial crimes.

Under the title Three Doors – Forensic Architecture/Forensis, Initiative 19. Februar Hanau, Initiative in Gedenken an Oury Jalloh, the Frankfurter Kunstverein has invited the research agencies Forensic Architecture and Forensis to jointly develop an exhibition from 2 June to 11 September 2022, in which three new works by Forensic Architecture and Forensis are presented. Their visual investigations into the 19 February 2020 racist terrorist attack in Hanau are the main focus of the show. A new plausibility study on the case of Oury Jalloh, who burned to death in a police cell in Dessau in 2005, is also being presented. In addition, the exhibition highlights ongoing investigations, such as those into the NSU murders and international human rights violations, in order to illustrate a spectrum of forensic and imaging science methodologies.

The exhibition arose as a collaboration between various parties: the research agency Forensic Architecture, its affiliated agency Forensis Berlin, Initiative 19. Februar Hanau, Initiative in Gedenken an Oury Jalloh, journalists and documentarists, and the cultural institution Frankfurter Kunstverein. They work as a coalition of civil society forces and experts in various fields.

Severely beaten, secretly detained and forcibly returned from Greece six times, Parvin A filed a complaint at the UN Human Rights Committee for multiple violations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in February 2022. Her case exposes the systematic Greek practice of pushbacks owing to digital evidence she was able to preserve from inside detention and at the border which was analyzed as part of a Forensic Architecture investigation. 

The rise of counterfactual politics on- and off-line, presents societies with a dilemma. One option is to buttress the institutional basis of factual authority by supporting the existing judiciary, media, universities and cultural venues. Another approach, presented here, is more risky: to seize the contemporary moment of institutional crisis as an opportunity for a radical transformation of the way facts are produced and disseminated. This approach responds to the current skepticism towards institutional pronouncements with a vital form of collective truth-production; one that is both diffused and diverse, based on establishing an expanded community of practice that incorporates aesthetic and scientific sensibilities. Organized by one such community of practice, the Investigative Commons, this event brings together investigators, lawyers, activists, artists, architects and academics. They will discuss the ways in which new investigative practices have the potential to challenge different forums for the presentations of facts and articulation of claims: the mainstream media brought into crisis by the growth of ‘open source’ and 'citizen’ journalism; museums, which have been turned into sites of political contestation; and the courts where new kind of evidence, citizen-produced and crowd-verified, challenges traditional legal process.