Forensic Architecture
Sonsbeek 2026 Not wheelchair accessible
POST, Arnhem
Inleiding
Situated Testimonies, 2022
The Grenfell Tower Fire: Situated Testimonies, 2024
Restituting Evidence: Genocide and Reparations in German Colonial Namibia, 2021
German Colonial Genocide in Namibia: The Hornkranz Massacre, 2024
Return to al-Ma'in, 2025
The Massacre at Tur al-Zagh: Al-Dawayima, 29 October 1948
'When It Stopped Being a War': The Situated Testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, 2024
Photo: Marjon Gemmeke
Forensic Architecture's presentation at POST centers the practice of “situated testimony”: an interviewing technique through which individuals recount and spatialize their experience of a traumatic event. This contribution traces the ways in which situated testimony has developed and expanded over a decade of practice to engage latent sensory memory as well as “inherited testimonies” transmitted across generations. Investigative films illustrating the technique in practice are presented alongside sketches produced by witnesses during interviews and libraries of digital objects prepared by researchers to support live reconstruction.
About the artist
Forensic Architecture (est. 2010, London) is an interdisciplinary research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London that develops and employs innovative methods for investigating state and corporate violence. Forensic Architecture works in partnership with institutions across civil society—grassroots activists, legal teams, international NGOs, and media organizations—to carry out investigations with and on behalf of communities and individuals affected by conflict, police brutality, border regimes, and environmental violence. The research agency uses advanced digital modeling, architectural, and spatial analysis, open-sourced research, and situated interviewing techniques in pursuit of accountability across a range of forums. Its work has been presented in national and international courtrooms, including the International Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights, and the United Nations General Assembly, and in exhibitions at leading cultural institutions, including the National Art Gallery of Namibia, Windhoek, 2025; 36th Bienal de São Paulo, 2025; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, 2022; Institute of Contemporary Arts London, 2021; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2021; and 17th Venice Biennale for Architecture, 2021. Forensic Architecture is also credited with the creation of an eponymous new field and form of interdisciplinary investigative practice, and has supported the growth of agencies worldwide that apply and develop its methods.
Presented by Sonsbeek 2026 in collaboration with POST