The Architecture of Public Truth

The conference The Architecture of Public Truth brings together the fields of law and aesthetic production. Artists, writers, lawyers, judges, activists, theorists, and architects will raise questions about recent transformations in the conditions under which spatial and material evidence is recorded and presented. The conference sets out to explore ways in which new kinds of engagement with the materiality of politics might open new political possibilities and shift existing fields of knowledge. The panels will explore a wide range of issues and scales: from the human body, through buildings and territories, to the scale of the planet as the ultimate forensic object, which human-induced climate change has transformed into both a construction site and a ruin.

The list of participants includes, among others, novelist Jonathan Littell (The Kindly Ones); Luis Moreno Ocampo, the first Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague; legal theorist Brenna Bhandar; Baltasar Garzón, Spanish jurist who indicted Augusto Pinochet and present legal advisor to Julian Assange; Al Jazeera producer Marcela Pizzaro; media scholar and artist Susan Schuppli; geo-philosopher Kathryn Yusoff; Michael Sfard, Israel’s foremost human rights lawyer; and Wolfgang Kaleck, General Secretary of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, who has recently submitted a Communication to the International Criminal Court against British war crimes in Iraq.

Forensis is a collaborative project between Haus der Kulturen der Welt, with support from Hauptstadtkulturfonds, and Forensic Architecture, an ERC-funded research project of Goldsmiths, University of London.