Forensic Architecture founder Eyal Weizman has used a speech at the Culture Summit Abu Dhabi to set out the group’s position on the relationship between architecture and human rights. Weizman, who is also a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, offered the summit a series of examples of how the Peabody Award-winning, Turner Prize-nominated organization has used spatial principles to expose human rights abuses.

“Forensic architecture is a way of reading architectural facts, architectural material, architectural situations, in order to see within them evidence for these violations that I'm speaking about,” Weizman said, as reported by The National News. “Perhaps the best way to understand it is, just like a pathologist reads a dead body — looking at the bones — forensic architecture looks for evidence of these crimes in walls, in foundations, in buildings, in plans, in bridges, in roads etc in a way that they're conceived sometimes, in order to survey and control us.”

Since its founding in 2010 at Goldsmiths, Forensic Architecture has used architectural and media techniques to investigate a series of building-related incidents and controversies. In 2017, we reported on the group's investigation into bombings in Syria, while in 2018, the group created a public database for people to submit footage of the Grenfell Tower fire in London in order to visually map the incident.

At the summit in Abu Dhabi, Weizman offered a further reflection on Forensic Architecture’s activities in the Gaza Strip, where the group is analyzing violations of human rights committed by the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, widely seen as a violation of international law.

“These are hilltop settlements, designed by architects almost as strategic tools, in what I call the civilian occupation,” Weizman said. “You see how architecture and planning can actually not only serve people, not only show the best of humanity but also be an exercise of violence.”

Earlier this year, the group also launched the “Living Archaeology in Gaza” project, examining the fate of an important architectural site under assault in the Gaza Strip. In 2021, meanwhile, the group was at the center of a controversy at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, UK, where Weizman's team temporarily withdrew their exhibition over censorship concerns.

“Our work is presented in courts, but it's also presented in exhibitions, because we believe in the function and in the potential of art and culture, to allow places for accountability; to allow places where precise information about the most important aspects and the most important violations of human rights [can] be exposed,” Weizman told the Abu Dhabi summit.

“I think that this is a small example of how agency and accountability could be exercised through the creative process, through collaboration between artists, architects, lawyers and journalists, and how we can go across those disciplines in order to find a new way to exercise our art.”