Research project using multiple visualisation techniques to map spatial and social injustice as a form of ethical and environmental advocacy
Context
Globally, governments, corporations, and institutions have ties to powerful stakeholders and often censor information regarding their relations and activities. Accumulating control over land, resources, and information for the sake of privatised profit or power, these state-corporate alliances violate people’s spatial and social rights, as well as the rights of nature. Greater transparency of activities undertaken by such alliances is important for enabling their reform and transformation. Such transparency would prevent activities such as fossil-fuel investment, data harvesting, land dispossession for mining and development, waste dumping, and militarised policing from remaining the covert, legally- and technocratically-insulated enterprises they are today.
Practice
The London-based research agency Forensic Architecture uses architectural techniques not to deliver buildings but to uncover precisely these kinds of covert enterprises. The techniques and tools Forensic Architecture uses include aerial mapping, photography, geolocation, 3D modelling, and fluid dynamics. The agency often collaborates with local activist groups, and emphasises the close connection between climate damage and human rights abuses. To focus on this connection, the agency opened an environmental studies unit in 2020, the Centre for Contemporary Nature, which investigates issues such as fracking and forest fires.
The unit’s project Cloud Studies examines various kinds of air pollution, understanding air as a medium for human rights abuses and environmental degradation, from tear gas sprayed by police in political protests to chemical weapons used by the military, and from polluting petrochemical plants to herbicide emissions. Cloud Studies looks at the use of tear gas and chemical weapons as tools of warfare against people in Chile, Palestine, Lebanon, Indonesia, the UK, and the US. The project also exposes environmental racism against Black Americans living along the Mississippi River in Louisiana, an area polluted by large petrochemical facilities whose grounds formerly housed sugar plantations and cemeteries for enslaved people. Through this lens, Cloud Studies exposes what American author Saidiya Hartman calls the afterlives of slavery, which continue to impact people through environmental racism and socioeconomic precarity.
Forensic Architecture’s initiatives illustrate the important political role that collaborative and interdisciplinary methods of investigation and representation can play in exposing issues of environmental and social injustice in the built environment. The agency encourages questions such as: What harms are being inflicted in a given place, and by whom? How can visual research and dissemination expose and interrupt cycles of harm occurring there? In prompting such questions, Forensic Architecture helps redefine architecture as a political and ethical practice less concerned with delivering new buildings than with improving social and ecological relations within existing spaces. It shows how professionalised barriers between artistic, journalistic, educational, and activist remits can be overcome, in order to work towards climate and social justice at systemic and social scales. The fact that Forensic Architecture’s projects have travelled so widely across exhibitions and online events and faced censorship on multiple occasions indicates the group’s global relevance and powerful interventions in the status quo.