Forensic Architecture: Open Verification

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A defining characteristic of our era is a sustained attack against the traditional authorities that underpins 'facts': government experts,universities, media and the judiciary. Furthermore, social media has become a place where state actors, belligerents, and'counterfactual communities' spread doubt and construct alternative realities. Within this technological-political-epistemic crisis, factsaround human and environmental rights violations have themselves become battlefields.A common response is to buttress the traditional custodians of factual authority; FAOV seeks to offer an alternative. Departing fromthe ground-breaking work of Forensic Architecture-founded by the PI a decade ago to use architectural tools and technologies toprovide decisive evidence confronting human rights violations in courts, media and cultural venues-this project will develop a newmode of investigative practice that we call 'open verification'. FAOV will socialise the development and deployment of evidencethrough collaboration with frontline communities and diffused networks of specialists and investigators. It posits that both thequality of investigations and the trust in the facts they produce will be augmented if a greater number and a wider diversity of partiesis involved in their production. With each new case, a new community of practice will be woven from the interaction ofcomplementary and divergent viewpoints, and the integration of different forms of knowledge.FAOV will engage in real-world human rights casework, confronting nationalist "denialism" across four related domains: policeviolence against racialised communities, human rights violations at Europe's borders, environmental destruction by corporations, andcolonial legacy. Each investigation is also a starting point for critical reflections on the new social, technological, and political life offacts, to be made public in books, exhibitions, documentary films and public programmes.