To make the invisible visible – interview with Eyal Weizman

 Eyal Weizman was born in Haifa in present-day Israel, but lives now in London. He’s an architect, author, and Professor of Spatial and Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, where he also founded the Centre for Research Architecture. In 2010 he established Forensic Architecture in London, and in 2022 its sister organization Forensis in Berlin.

Forensic Architecture (FA) consists of an interdisciplinary team and their projects have been exhibited in some of the most renowned art institutions worldwide. However, one of the truly unique things with the organisation is that they also have had their art recognized as evidence in legal cases about human rights, including in the International Court of Justice in Hague. FA's work with collecting evidence through in-depth investigations of architecture and landscape as well as their use of open sources has been described as a paradigm shift within the human rights field.

Since October 2023, they have investigated Israel's attacks on the Gaza Strip, including on behalf of South Africa in connection with their case against Israel in the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Forensic Architecture's reports conclude that Israel is committing genocide. The UN Special Rapporteur for the Middle East, Francesca Albanese, and Eyal Weizman were recently invited to give lectures at the Freie Universität in Berlin (19.02.25), but were canceled due to accusations of anti-Semitism[1].

The following conversation took place on Zoom, ahead of Eyal Weizman's visit to the HUMAN festival in Oslo, March 16[2].

Methods for non-violent resistance

Vibeke Harper: Forensic Architecture (FA) have offices on most continents at this point and works with several different issues, but going back to 2010, when FA was established, it began in Palestine?

Eyal Weizman: Forensic Architecture really emerged in the context of the anti-colonial work in Palestine. Palestine and the occupation are often seen as a laboratory for the development of arms and of mechanisms of control. So it’s also a great site for development in struggle, and particularly in the context of non-armed struggle and resistance. There's been so much know-how and creativity in international Palestinian and Israeli left anti-Zionist groups. And Forensic Architecture is part of that world. Other people that have innovated within that field is people like Issa Amro[3], and also to a certain extent my sister [the performing artist Einat Weizman[4]] and many other Palestinians and activists who are using their different tools or techniques. If you are a theatre person, you engage the anti-colonial work using theatre. If you are a media person, you innovate in media by creating new media platforms. As architects, we apply architectural tools and techniques in order to allow a different type of documentation and evidence of what is going on.

Therese Bjørneboe: Are you usually working on commission? Or how do you choose cases to work with?

 E.W.: Usually, we undertake an investigation on behalf of a bereaved family. Such as the family of Shireen Abu Akleh[5], who approached us to look at the Israeli targeted killing of one of the greatest journalists reporting the crimes of the Israeli occupation – and was killed for it. So usually, we work directly with the families. We try not to enter the space of people's trauma uninvited; we want to be asked in order to enter that space on the invitation and knowledge of the people who are struggling with a particular case. Also, that case needs to have a political significance. Of course, we want to honor a life lost by investigating the details of the way in which it was taken, the details of the murder, but we always work according to the principle of the long duration of a split second, meaning in every split-second scenario we go into the molecular level of time, into the microseconds. Within that molecular level analysis, we find a long duration of colonial histories.

A Cartography of Genocide

V.H.: Since October 2023 you’ve meticulously monitored the ongoing genocide and have published several reports that proves Israels systematic destruction of Gaza. How do you approach something as comprehensive as a genocide?

 E.W.: In October 2023, very early on, we realized that this is a different order of an action, I think it dawned on us that this is a genocide in the making. A week into the events, on the 13th of October, Israel tried to evacuate the entirety of Gaza City and the north of the Gaza Strip making people move south of Wadi Gaza. An eviction of a whole city within 24 hours, while at the same time targeting the roadways and people retreating, people fleeing the most intense bombardment in history, all in an area with the seize of your Hamar Municipality. We've had a close partner organization in Gaza called Ain Media[6], and the director of this organization, Roshdi Al-Sarraj[7] was killed in a targeted strike on his house on the 22nd of October. Several of my colleagues have family in Gaza, every morning we were trembling just in fear of what they would tell us had taken place, who they had lost during the night … We felt that we were in a complete crisis and a bit helpless. Could we stop it, and did it matter to provide evidence of something that is so blatantly there that it is obvious, what is the evidence for? We have our tools, techniques and our knowledge, we know the place and people. But we realized that we couldn't work in the same way as before, we had to develop new methods. It's not possible to investigate every single murder when the number of people killed just continues to rise[8]. Today, the estimated number of people killed in Gaza is well over 100,000[9].

 V.H.: Last October you published the report A Cartography of Genocide[10], along with a database[11]. Was that a commissioned work?

 E.W.: Yes, early on we received a request from the South African legal team and started to work closely together with them. It was a challenge, a legal challenge that we felt could meet the enormity of what was happening.

South Africa is a country that has suffered settler-colonialism, a country that has suffered apartheid. Every settler-colonial apartheid is different, it speaks in different idioms, but it is the same type of regime, and now they – a country from the global south – are taking on Israel, and by extension Israel’s supporters in the global north … It felt like a monumental challenge, and we wanted to support it in any way possible. We felt that the significance of that case was unprecedented. Not only was it a relief to anyone who had seen what was going on, it was also a recognition of the words used by activists in the streets, shouting Stop the Genocide, and the words that were used in fringes of academia, like settler-colonialism in relation to Israel. Now these words were articulated in a perfect legal idiom, in the highest kind of August forum that exists. It was an honor for us to work at their request and one of the greatest challenges to start assembling an evidence file of such an order and magnitude.

A genocide case is not about a single act of bombing or shooting; it's about a systematic and widespread relation between all those moments in space and time. It's not about showing that there was an erroneous targeting of a family in their home; it’s about showing that this is a system, this is a policy repeated across space and across time by the different units at different times. If it happened in October and November 2023, it also happens in November 2024. Or if one individual unit of infantry is doing it in the north of Gaza in January 2024, another unit is doing the same thing in the south at a different time. This means that what they respond to is a policy rather than contingency. That's the idea of genocide litigation. To look at systems, to look at the way things are designed, the way they are preconceived with the intent to destroy a people in all or in part. As architects we were particularly looking at one of the articles of the Genocide Convention that speaks about the destruction of infrastructure for life, the means by which life can be maintained, more or less like the slow killing that is articulated by denying society of all its infrastructure necessary for its survival, such as hospitals, schools, water facilities, agriculture.

 V.H.: As you say, a genocide is not one single action, but actions repeated and connected within a system. How did you break that system down to the molecular level?

 E.W.: We were hovering in enormous amounts of data. Every data point is a heartbreaking account. Every data point is a testimony of a child or a parent that has lost somebody. Every data point is enormously difficult to look at. At some point, one of my colleagues said to me, ‘we are looking at those things so that others won’t have to look at them’. We're looking at them so we can abstract them. We don't even want to represent, we don't even want to mirror that graphic material. We have tagged those tens of thousands of data points by space and time and type, showing the relation between them. And that is the way we’ve worked. This is not like a Forensic Architecture-project that is showing exactly what type of bomb, what perspective, what trajectory a bullet has taken, but it shows hyper relations between a huge multiplicity of data points, and behind every data point there’s a human being.

The longer story

T.B.: One definitions of genocide is that one can prove that an army (or a state) is targeting the civilians instead of military units. So, what you are describing is that you, in a very meticulous way, have documented the way Israel has targeted civilian lives during the war, and that this evidence will be used in court. This is the work you're doing for South Africa?

 E.W.: Yes. So, we produced this 800-pages report and a database in which you can follow every action. This is evidence that hopefully will be presented and used in court. But I want to add another thing about genocide. Genocide is not only about the killing of civilians. It's about the intent, the intent to destroy a people on every level. ‘An intent’ is a very complicated category to establish, because do you know what you want, always? And a state, which consists of a multitude of people, how does it establish what it wants? Intent is a complex thing. Even though the Israelis did say exactly what they wanted to happen; they said ‘we want to kill civilians, we want to destroy everything, we want to extract revenge’[12]. But still, in order to establish that it is in fact a genocide, you need to go back in time. You need to show how genocide sits within the longer history of Israeli settler-colonization.

Israeli settler-colonialism initially seeds an area with settlements, then they need to cleanse that area, removing the Palestinians, in order to open land for those agrarian settlements. Gaza was about one percent of Palestine in 1948. The majority of people in the south were expelled from their homes and placed in Gaza. And for Israel it was a small price to pay: Giving up one percent of the land of Israel, the Holy Land, but turning it into a place where you concentrate people and at the same time open up enormous amount of land for colonization. So that could have ended there. But Palestinian resistance did not accept it and has justly continued demanding the right to return to their lands. Israel has tried to expel Palestinians into Egypt throughout its history, but Egypt has been unwilling to take them. At some point, the idea needed to be to punish them in such a way, or to eliminate such a big number of them, that resistance would not be possible. What we see in Gaza now is the last stage of typical settler-colonialism. But in order to understand it, you need to go back historically, and a large part of our report is telling the history of that conflict and showing how different moves that have been made by Israel since October 2023 is actually rhyming with and echoing historical patterns, like the weaponization of aid. Gaza has been under siege for almost two decades, during that time aid has always been a tool used by Israel to starve people into compliance. It’s been done for the past 20 years, and that’s why it emerged early on during the genocide in Gaza. And then there is expulsion; Israel's relation to Palestinians is one through expulsion, and the genocide in Gaza has been undertaken by expelling Palestinians from the north into the south. So, all those tools exist within the vocabulary of Israeli settler-colonialism.

 V.H.: Norway is one of those that still is advocating for a two-state solution, perhaps in an attempt to fulfill their intention behind the Oslo Accords, or perhaps more accurately the intention of at least some of those involved in that process.

E.W.: Yeah, I think they have undone their own. One of the intentions of the settlement-project in the West Bank and around Jerusalem is exactly in order not to allow the possibility of partition. It is designed to stop the two-state solution. And once you have done that, you need to face the consequences; you have one state. I mean, in fact, there is a single state today; Israel is controlling all the area between the river and the sea. And it’s an apartheid state in the sense that there isn’t equal life prospect for Palestinians and Israelis in that space. Tenker og føler at denne setningen er viktig også I den norske?

Solidarity in exile

T.B.: You have an office in London, and for some time you also have had an office in Berlin. It is a huge majority of diaspora Palestinians living in Berlin, but there are also a lot of young, probably left-wing, Jewish Israelis who has moved to Berlin over the last decades.

 E.W.: Berlin is magic. It's fantastic being in Germany where Jews, Palestinians, Arabs from Lebanon and Syria, whoever, can actually be together in resistance to the state. But it's also been very difficult; the organization that I run there, Forensis[13], has been partially defunded and so on, but it is really important to understand and not to underestimate the kind of solidarity that has been formed, the kind of proximity in those communities where I, as an Israeli Jew, can meet a Palestinian on an equal footing. That is what those alternative spaces that have evolved in Germany have given us. So yeah, it's been horrible, horrible year, but it's also been great to see how those alternative spaces of solidarity are forming.

 V.H.: People joining forces gives hope. But you’ve also mentioned that 7th October 2023 created a shift among several of your Israeli friends and colleagues living in Berlin, that many turned to supporting the State of Israel?

 E.W.: Yes, immediately after October, people were traumatized. Things are moving with time, but it was a very traumatic situation, and people were responding in a way that actually weaponized this trauma. And obviously we could see that. There is no doubt about Jewish vulnerability and the sense of insecurity coming from that history. But there is a mismatch between that sense, and the strength that you have in a region and the ability to do things to other people who are under one's control and brute force. And we have seen the way in which Jewish vulnerability has been weaponized in Palestine in order to unleash this enormously vengeful campaign. And Jewish vulnerability has been weaponized in Germany against migrants, in alignment with the extreme right perspective of implying that anti-Semitism is something that is imported from the Arab world. I mean, this has never been the case. German mainstream opinion sees German white anti-Semitism in a very forgiving light but sees anti-Semitism ‘everywhere in the Palestinian attitude towards Israel’, and I think this is, again, a weaponization of a certain set of vulnerabilities that are true and existing. It’s a battle of narratives.

We’re a hybrid

V.H.: Going back to Forensic Architecture; you're working with uncovering the truth through reassembling actions and situations, and you do that by, as you explained, hovering in enormous amounts of data through open sources. Does the emerging AI-technology represent a challenge, in terms of making sure that the material you work with is real?

 E.W.: When you have a lot of videos of one particular incident, a fake video would not agree with the others. The power that we have as open-source researchers is that today we would have dozens and dozens of videos of one particular incident. We build the cases by synchronizing those and interweaving them. We do it inside architectural models, this is what a forensic architect does. And the truth has its funny characteristics that if two true accounts exist, they would cross in a particular point. A lie would not cross, would not weave into the construction with the truth. And the more true videos you have, the more you can create the fabric that would make the fake video drop.

 V.H.: Another interesting thing about Forensic Architecture is that you're operating within several fields simultaneously; the human rights organization and the court, the art field and the exhibition venues, as well as within the academic field. It’s a multifaceted organization?

 E.W.: Yeah, it's a hybrid and our strength are in being a hybrid. Our strength is the fact that Forensic Architecture includes architects and artists, filmmakers, lawyers, scientists and journalists, and that we work together and never are just one thing. We do journalism, but we're not only journalists. We do exhibitions all over the world, but we're not only artists. We practice architectural software, but we're not building buildings. We are providing evidence, but we are not lawyers as such. The strength of Forensic Architecture really comes from presenting a single case in multiple forms. So, war crimes or crimes against humanity or human rights violation are always state crimes, and it’s sometimes very difficult to present them in a state court, because sometimes this court will not invite you in, or will depoliticize the case. This is why we present every case in multiple forms. We make it into a journalistic story. We place it in an art context. We do it as a human rights report. Maybe we write a book. It's all those things together that make the work stronger. And each forum allows another facet of the evidence to shine. Also, we understand how curatorial practice and performance, for example, help us create our work. Just as the court could learn a lot from curators, because a curator is presenting an argument through images or moving images in space, which is similar to what a lawyer is doing. The court could benefit from the expertise of artists, especially if the most crucial thing deals with image interpretation, then it's the image practitioners that should be to listen to.

 T.B.: Your model reminds me a bit of the work that Milo Rao og IIPM (International Institute of Political Murder) is doing. Do you know Raus’ work?

 E.W.: Yes of course.

T.B.: He’s both a journalist and a director, known for his reenactments [like Hate Radio, from Rwanda, and the process against the Ceaușescus’ in Romania], and works like The Congo Tribunal and The Moscow Processes, where he arranges court cases or hearings that can’t take place in real life, due to the political circumstances. Do you see any similarities with your work?

 E.W.: Yeah, and we've used theater in different contexts, particularly when we investigated the attack on the theater in Mariupol[14][24.02.22–16.03.22] together with Stanford Spatial Technologies. In the beginning of this full-scale Russian invasion a very special situation emerged, where the theatre in Mariupol functioned as a safe house. People from all over the city arrived to this building, it became a city in itself, with a kitchen, a parliament, a school, a hospital ... Many of the functions that the city had were now spatialized within the theatre. It was the theatre professionals – directors, actors, prop people and so on – that organized this miraculous survival of that community. And we wanted to research and present that resilience of Ukrainian civil society in face of that onslaught. The way we did that was through also reenacting what took place together with some of the survivors. Mainly we did it in the computer, building immersive 3D-models, where people could recall by moving through that space.

Anti-semitism and islamophobia

T.B.: We are running out of time, but I would like you to comment on leftist anti-semitism, which has become a hot topic during the last years, especially in Germany, but also in Norway. Is there a ‘leftist anti-semitism’?

 E.W.: Anti-semitism exists in society and society includes both left and right, it’s absolutely possible that it exists in some circles and anti-semitism should not be tolerated anywhere. The question is how it is presented and how it is politicized. It seems to me that right now, the notion of anti-semitism is weaponized against migrants particularly, not so much the left community.

T.B.: And against artists.

E.W.: It is mainly taken by right-wing organizations and parties, using the notion of anti-semitism in order to survey, to control, to de-platform, to fire people with migrant background. We need to be vigilant about that, because anti-semitism is a very worrying phenomenon. The fight against anti-semitism is really important. But when you use it as a weapon against migrants, you also make Jews unsafe, because if you use Jewish vulnerability to constrain, control, limit, or even expel people of migrant background, you make the Jew the enemy of the migrant. And in a sense, you create a situation where it's unsafe to be. And I think you need to take on everything; every societal racism and hate needs to be confronted together. Islamophobia and anti-semitism are nourished by the same, it should not be put against each other. They're not in opposition, they're part of a right-wing massive revival that sweeps across the global north right now.

*

Vibeke Harper is an artist and has curated the segment 'Mapping Genocide in Gaza. Lecture and conversation with Eyal Weizman' for HUMAN IDFF at Vega Scene, in Oslo, March 16. In addition, she has written the play 'In Heavy Water' in collaboration with his sister Einat Weizman, with Eyal Weizman as artistic consultant. The play will be shown as a staged reading at Vega Scene as part of HUMAN IDFF on March 15. (The interview took place on January 13th. 2025).

References:

Forensic Architecture’s report about the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh:

https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/shireen-abu-akleh-the-targeted-killing-of-a-journalist

Forensic Architecture’s report A Carthography of Genocide: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/a-cartography-of-genocide

Forensic Architecture’s platform about the genocide in Gaza: https://gaza.forensic-architecture.org/database

The Lancet’s publication about the estimation of casualties: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext

Al Jazeera’s live-tracker: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker

Ain Media: https://ain-media.com

Roshi Al-Sarraj: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/23/another-palestinian-journalist-slain-in-an-israeli-airstrike-in-gaza

Issa Amro and Youth Against settlements: https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/issa-amro-youth-against-settlements/

Einat Weizman: https://www.einatweizman.com

Interview with Eyal Weizman and Emily Dische-Becker by George Prochnik: https://granta.com/once-again-germany-defines-who-is-a-jew-part-ii/

Article by Eyal Weizman: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/eyal-weizman/exchange-rate

About the Nakba: https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba/

About Forensis: https://counter-investigations.org/about/association

Investigative Commons: https://investigative-commons.org

FA’s work on Mariupol Drama Theatre:

https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/a-city-within-a-building-the-mariupol-drama-theatre

Forensic Architectures project in Whitney Museum: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/triple-chaser

FA’s work on the killing of Hind Rajab: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-killing-of-hind-rajab

Bevismateriale i Haag: https://projects.research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/en/horizon-magazine/forensic-architects-piecing-together-story-war

More links:

https://www.dezeen.com/2020/02/20/forensic-architecture-founder-eyal-weizman-denied-entry-to-us/

https://www.dezeen.com/2019/12/28/jamie-fobert-cbe-sadie-morgan-obe-new-years-honours-2020/

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/feb/25/forensic-architects-eyal-weizman

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/1/14/intent-in-the-genocide-case-against-israel-is-not-hard-to-prove

Footnotes:

[1] https://www.brismes.ac.uk/news/academic-freedom-letter-regarding-the-free-university-of-berlin-s-cancellation-of-the-lectures-by-francesca-albanese-and-prof-eyal-weizman

Pressrelease Freie Universität: https://www.brismes.ac.uk/news/academic-freedom-letter-regarding-the-free-university-of-berlin-s-cancellation-of-the-lectures-by-francesca-albanese-and-prof-eyal-weizman

[2] https://vp.eventival.com/humanfilm/2025/film/1097579

[3] Issa Amro is a human rights activist, runs Youth Against Settlements in Hebron. https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/issa-amro-youth-against-settlements/

[4] Einat Weizman is a director, playwright, actor and activist. https://www.einatweizman.com

[5] Shireen Abu Akleh was a reporter for 25 years for Al Jazeera, killed in Jenin by the Israeli army, 11 May 2022. FAs report: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/shireen-abu-akleh-the-targeted-killing-of-a-journalist

[6] Ain Media: https://ain-media.com

[7] Roshdi Al-Sarraj: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/23/another-palestinian-journalist-slain-in-an-israeli-airstrike-in-gaza

[8] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker

[9] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext

[10] https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/a-cartography-of-genocide

[11] https://gaza.forensic-architecture.org/database

[12] https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/1/14/intent-in-the-genocide-case-against-israel-is-not-hard-to-prove

[13] About Forensis: https://counter-investigations.org/about/association

[14] FA’s work on Mariupol Drama Theatre: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/a-city-within-a-building-the-mariupol-drama-theatre