ARCH+ features 67: On the NSU Complex, Forensic Architecture and the Potentials of Architecture Theory
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Weizman, Eyal
Trüby, Stephan
Eyal Weizman in conversation with Stephan Trüby Tuesday, 24 October 2017, 7 p.m. Lothringer 13 Halle, Munich Do institutions change shape depending on the people within them? This question has strong political implications, as we are currently experiencing in the US, but it is seen across the spectrum that the attitudes of people lend their institutions a political orientation. The work of Forensic Architecture understands architecture as a social practice, using architectural methods of investigation to determine the legal implications of political and violent conflicts and to name those responsible. Eyal Weizman will discuss the methodical approach of Forensic Architecture and the political significance of architecture and theory in the post-factual age by discussing the ‘NSU Complex’ with Stephan Trüby. In cooperation with TUM Talks on Architecture, ARCH+, Bayerische Architektenkammer, and Lothringer 13 Halle
 Thank you very much, Anlingo, for the nice introduction. Thank you very much, Jörg Kopmann, for being our host. It's a pleasure, a great pleasure for me and I'm sure for all of us to be back here again and welcome also from my side to our guest this evening, Ile Weitzmann. Before we start and we will jump in a minute right into the middle of the NSU complex, let me allow a few introductory remarks. And I'm saying this not only, I'm saying this mainly as a civil servant, as a beamter, as we say in Germany. And as a beamter you might know you are obliged to be politically neutral and for me it's, I try to stick to this to a certain extent, but at the other hand it's on a day-to-day basis more and more difficult to be silent. And one of the events or processes that really appalled not only me but I'm sure many of us is the NSU complex. The NSU complex I'm definitely not talking about the NSU trial but the NSU complex. So there's obviously a message in our title here already. Obviously what the NSU complex invites us is to really think carefully about the potential involvement of parts of German authorities in one of the most brutal murder series that we had to witness in the last couple of years between 2000 and 2007 if even Angela Merkel calls this a national disgrace we should be really alarmed. And I think Ile Weitzmann together with his colleagues from forensic architecture contributed to our state of alarm. And I think it's very good and great that you hear that we can talk about some aspects of your research which I think is highly important to discuss the events of the NSU murders in a bigger context. Today as some of us know is the 384th day of the NSU trial. I heard from friends who were at the trial today that not too much happened today. There will be continuation of the trial tomorrow morning. I heard the key words interruptions, for Zögerungsanträge and so everybody is waiting for the statements of the attorneys and the solicitors. But there's a certain hope that the statements will start tomorrow but we are not sure yet. I'm sure I'm really not an expert in the NSU trial itself but I'm sure later when we open the discussion we will learn maybe something about what happened today and what we can expect tomorrow. I would like to start our dialogue, our conversation with giving you a quick overview. We start right in the middle with the NSU complex. We will talk about the 9th murder that forensic architecture in Eilweizmann had a very close look at in particular. Then we recapitulate some aspects of what forensic architecture has been doing in the last couple of years and then we come back towards the end again to think about the consequences of the research of forensic architecture for possible evolution and involvement of the NSU trial. Let's start with the beginning basically with the NSU trial, with the NSU complex I have to say. Obviously we are talking here with three official members of a so-called national socialist underground, a so-called NSU, but there are so many hints that we shouldn't talk about only these three people that we have to talk about more helpers than are on trial at the moment. Maybe I should mention before Eil introduces us to his work on the 9th murder of Haladi Yoskat who had to die in the year 2007 I think, 2006 I'm sorry, that we have to talk about potential involvement of members of the state. Eil, you produced research around this especially around the 9th murder of the NSU. How did this come about? Who asked you etc. So first of all thanks to you Stefan and to Andine for the invitation. The commission really developed through a series of discussion with an organization called Tribunal for Unraveling the NSU complex. The fact that Tribunal, people's Tribunal had to be assembled was a feeling amongst some of the activists concerned in this case, some of the family members of people that lost their ones in the attacks and some members of the communities that felt persecuted by it that the state dealing with that case was really inadequate. And this is why they called the controversy the NSU complex. It's not only a series of killings but a network of relations between different organizations starting from the police then of course the Fafasumschütz then also the court. So if the police effectively considered members of the family of the deceased to be suspects and harassed them, the Fafasumschütz whose duty it is really, this is its reason of being to protect those vulnerable in society from radical political violence, they haven't done their job. Not only have they not done their job, the community felt very much accused and vilified. And then in the trial itself many of the members, many of the witnesses felt that the story as they wanted to be heard, as they want to speak it is not really allowed to be spoken. This is perhaps to do with the particularity of the criminal trial but also that the mandate of that discussion was not really to open up the case on its full political social implications but simply to look at the guilt or innocence of one individual who was still, the verdict is not yet drawn. So that initiative was formed and usually people's tribunal or citizens tribunal, institution, popular institutions that ask for independent investigation. They put demands to the state. However in this case the decision was not to put demand to the state but actually to take over investigation themselves. That is to say civil society need to have the means and ability and perhaps resources, perhaps the willingness to actually undertake forensic investigation. It take on the means of production and because we were at a time known as an architectural research agency that work with lawyers, with human rights groups all over the world, they came to us. Now they presented to us the entire case on all its complexities and discussion upon discussions were undertaken but given that we have limited resources we decided to look for the one case where the story seems to falter at the weakest point and put all our resources in it. And of course the Halit Yozgat case is the one in which there was a state agent present at the scene of the crime and there was still an answered questions about what he was doing there. And of course even now that the trial is being concluded you could say more or less that the other killings are resolved in a sense that you know who the killer is and you know the motive. That one murder is still unresolved because until the role of Andreas Temet in it is clarified until we know why he is there you cannot say that that case is resolved. So we decided to invest all our resources in those 77 square meters off the shop and then 9 and a half minutes which is the time he spent on Andreas Temet spent in the shop, interrogate him very deeply and from that hopefully to make a crack and then follow the path of the crack outwards to make a political point. And sometimes politics does not need to be done from the outside in, from the big picture into the singularity but really like a biopsy or like acupuncture to press in on that particular weak point and hopefully unravel what you can from that. You produced research on different levels around this weak point around the murder of Halid Joscat. You produced one-to-one reenactments of the events but also of the spaces itself. We will see them, some of them in a minute but you also produced them with film and maybe while we have a look at this film you could give us a quick introduction into the context. I hope this works. So I mean basically just we need to understand what is I think before we enter into the particularities of the case is what is counter forensics. Obviously forensics is what the state does. This is a mean of surveillance and control that the state apply onto its citizens. Counter forensics is really kind of like suspended briefly so that we can introduce it and then we can move on. Is a way of inverting the forensic age. The way in which civilians or citizens can look up at the crime of states. The crime that we were looking here at is not the murder itself. We were not trying to solve the question or address the question of who shot Halid Joscat at about five o'clock on April 6, 2006. What we wanted, the crime that we were looking at is the crime of perjury. The lie of the Secret Service agent and Dres Temer when asked to describe what happened in there. So we are, it's a kind of asking, coming at the question from sideways if you like. And one of the main resources that we had and as I think as you know the material that counter forensics can work with is only open source material. We do not have access to secret police files. We do not have access to the Fafasung Schutz files. What we had access to is the leak. And there was a rather large dump, what we call data dump, of the entire castle police investigation of that. So we had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of documents written in German. We had to work with a lot of people that can read them. And from them what you see here is initially the basis of any architectural investigation. We needed to build a model. Now the shop doesn't exist anymore. The shop was sold and was converted into urban beehive shops. So you can raise your own bees kind of shop there now. We were going there obviously buying some honey and looking at that place. But also in the images that you're going to see in that clip are images that were leaked out. So here what we are applying is a very, very basic technique of constructing a 3D model from photography, converting depth and distortion of images into a measured 3D model. We'll just let it run. So this is for example kind of a police file. This is an image that existed in the police file and we were able pretty much to build an exact model from it. Obviously using also visits to the shop and satellite images, etc. And what you see here that is Andreas Temmer sitting at his desk and this is the view that he had of his computer. And then what we realized very fast that we had to do, and again I'll kind of like stop it briefly, but you saw, we can navigate back there, is that in order to conduct our experiments we needed to develop a technique that looks simultaneously at a reconstruction in digital space. But then there is a category in forensics called ground truth. The ground truth computer model is to anchor it in physical reality. So we build a 3D, we build a one to one model and we build a 3D model on a computer and every experiment we've done in both so that we could calibrate any result really in it. And of course we had, but you need to build, how do you build a one to one shop, you know, we didn't have a big budget, but we had our friends and I was working previously at the Hakawe in Berlin, the house of world cultures and they were putting at our disposal their space and stuff and we were building for less than a week, we build a one to one model, we worked with actors, we reenacted again and again the same event. I mean what you see here is the way that we have obstructed the physical model into a digital one, replacing some of the elements working with acoustic engineers, a lot of the tests as you will see later is to do with acoustics, replacing some of the Gibbs wall with wood, always panels of glass that we were bringing in there until our scientists were content that the level of ground truthing is precise enough, is that here? Okay, yeah, so you see now how basically this is the place in Berlin, we did not open it to, okay, that is gone, but so there was this, parts of the model were built very precisely, you might see it in some of the further clips and we reenacted in fact the reenactment, so we had Andreas Stemmer reenactment video and we treated the reenactment not as a representation of the crime, but as the crime, okay, because if he is lying, a reenactment is the testimony of the body and therefore there was a kind of reenactment of the reenactment to see what we could learn about movement, you know, your testimony could be equally in speech and in movement and that was our case. This is by the way the leak files. And this is well, right? Yeah, these are the leak documents that were made public at the beginning of 2015 with which we worked and here is, yeah, this is the. This is the continuation of the video, here we see the selection of the spaces you made and this is also, the fact that you didn't reconstruct everything but only a selection of it was also for criticism of your work which we will discuss later, an entry point, right? You see, every act of representation is an act of obstruction, right? Even in language when you say the word cat, right? It's a kind of an obstruction of what the animal, the mammal cat is. The question is how you calibrate your representation to be precise enough to answer your question and that was worked out together with scientists who were content that the level of obstruction was still reflective of the real space and we had a 3D model of the space as it was. Now, you know, we were trying to be as precise as possible. I mean, you might have seen already there, there's even the location of the ashtray, the location of the telephone of the, you know, the coffee cup on the table when it is very close to the murder and then the level of obstruction increases as you go towards the periphery and that is part of this logic. You were also very interested in time, obviously. The whole piece that you presented then on the document this year is called 77 square meters 9.26 minutes. If it would be such a terrible story, we could call it a kamerspiel in German but maybe just introduce us to the issue of time and this work. It was a very contemporary killing in a sense that it happened in an internet, okay, internet cafes are kind of like no longer kind of popular spaces but the problem that we have in forensic architecture mainly speaking to witnesses is that witnesses especially to traumatic events, especially witnesses to violence, these are the witnesses we speak to often have a very good recollection of sequences of actions but sometimes problem with duration. Was it seven minutes? Was it three minutes? Was it 15 minutes? It's sometimes that something that is not very clear. However, a murder that happens in an internet cafe in the presence of five witnesses means that all your witnesses are logged in. So they are connected to a timer that is the timer of the computer and then the timer of the internet, the timing of the internet. And what we've done is construct a time space matrix. We were building that space and then building the sort of the, if you like, the grid of time of possibilities into which we were mincing and placing the different bits of testimony into those boxes. So you had a very kind of a 4D, if you like, architectural space, 4D, the last being time in which we could reconstruct the choreography. And in fact, some of our actors were kind of rather well trained in the kind of the choreographic rhythm of responding to precise time. And we've done it with actors who were trying to perform the set of actions that would require, according to multiple scenarios, within that space. But here you go. If you murder somebody in an internet cafe, you need to know that the timings are going to be more precise. However, that was also a point of contention. And as we will get to at the end of the evening, I suppose. The aim of your research is obviously to prove that Andreas Temer at least had to be a witness of the murdered Halled Joskat, if not more. And you approached this proof on different levels with different senses, by the analysis of different senses amongst them as sound. And you produced this film. Also, maybe you can say something about this here. So effectively, our aim was to show that, well, we can let the gunshots in the background, to show that Andreas Temer was in fact lying. And to just kind of make a little perhaps technical point is to say, what is a witness? Witness is a person that has a sensory contact with an event. Obviously, it could be an eyewitness. If you see something, it could be an ear witness. If you hear something, you can even be a nose witness if you smell something. And you need to be conscious of what it is that you've seen. That makes you a witness. You need to have a direct sensory contact to an event. If you heard about somebody else's sensory contact, that is hearsay. You're no longer a witness. So we needed to show that Andreas Temer was a witness and was lying about not being a witness. And so in fact, it became a question of the senses. It became a question of the limit of the senses. What is the threshold of audibility? What is the lowest sound that we can be sure would have been heard? What is the threshold of smellability? There was a big question about would Andreas Temer be able to smell the gunpowder? Because when you shoot a gun in a closed room, you have the sulfur and ammonia in the gunpowder still lingers in the room for a long time. How do you calculate it? How do you show it? And what is the threshold of vision? So the architectural model operated like a sensorium. In fact, like a kind of a limit test to the threshold of the senses. In fact, in architectural theory, we might call it like a phenomenological space or an extreme phenomenological space. Here we face with a very big problem. We are counter-forensic people. We're not a police. How do you get guns? How do you get the right sound of the Cheska gun? In fact, if you go to the U.S. and especially in Arizona, when we went to, you can shoot anything, almost with anyone. And $5,000 was sent to America and that experiment was sent back by one of the most highly reputed kind of forensic experts that usually present evidence in the U.S. criminal trial. So you can see that. And in fact, here also there's an act of translation. He's shooting the, initially you heard the Cheska and now other guns. 32 with a wet suppressor. But he was calibrating the sound of the Cheska gun to another on which he was also threatened. He was calibrating the sound suppressor. And we were taking the lowest possible sound that could come out of the gun in that case, to be on the safe side. Sending it to Berlin, getting... Measurement one, high-level gun shot. Would otherwise be... Now. Used in nightclubs. Just a very high frequency. Measurement end. One. Measurement two, high-level gun shot. Start now. So this is a forensic expert from Anderson Acoustics who is actually conducting it within the space that we've built. Within that. And then again, as I said, every result was calibrated. Measurement one, gun shot. We can simply skip. Start now. And just see that the experiment was then repeated in a digital space and then calibrated one to the other. So you repeat it in two models. We also, on a computer, we needed to build a model of the room as we knew it to be. And a model of our model of the room to see how much our model, one-to-one model in the Hakawein Berlin deviated from the digital model. So there's like three layers of translation and calibration that goes in there. And the result was rather obvious. He would have heard it. Okay. This is the ear witness, Andreas Temmer. But you just mentioned the nose witness, Andreas Temmer. You also did a project here or a research experiment. Yes. This was a little bit more complicated because we knew also that in other cases the Uvers, the Wurwunlose and Uwebunhar, the killers, was shooting the gun through a bag, for a nylon bag. The reason that in murder cases people do that is for the cartridges not to fall on the ground. But that would have affected, in a rather unpredictable way, the smell of it. We did it anyway, assuming there was no bag, but we have caveated our result. We said only if there is no bag, we can be certain that there would have been the smell. I mean, I'm pretty, you know, I think in high probability that the smell would have still lingered even with the bag. Of course, the bag is torn when you shoot through it. But that was beyond the capacity of our computers to actually calculate the variability of that. Again, this is done simultaneously by looking at fluid dynamic by conducting an experiment of the behavior of fluid dynamic elements within a room. And later, I think this is coming now, that's not here, but we've repeated that digitally. And finally, there's the eye witness, Andreas Tami of the murder. And you produced here also a video. I think the video is the next one. So, yeah, I mean, as I said, what you see here, on the left, you would see the reenactment video, which is in fact for us a video of the crime. So, mostly what we do, we would look at different kind of violations that are captured on smartphones. Maybe we will see some of those, Stefan, later. Does it not work? I think it's it. Okay, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You can also kind of like skip forward a little bit or maybe I can do it. So here is Andreas Tami. Here is the space. We motion tracked his eyes within the room and then did some of that also manually. So we could figure out the place of his eyes and his head within the room at any given moment by analyzing the video. Then we have located a camera along that track that is based on our work with psychologists of perception of what would be the reasonable angle from which you could actually perceive things. We've reduced it further to be more sure. And what you see here on the left is the reenactment video, which is for us. As I say, no, this is for us like a video of a bomb, right? This is a video of the crime itself, not of a representation of the crime, because he is now performing the crime of lying about not having perceived, right? The left video, maybe I should mention this, you can watch on YouTube. That's Andreas Tami's reenactment. Yeah, yeah, but you see it over here on the left and then you can see him getting closer. He's saying that he's looking for Halit Yozgat. He cannot find him. Now he's putting those famous coins on the table and the minute that he leans, we have the position of the body in full sight. Now where we have the position of the body from is from work, very close work together with the father of Halit, with Ismail Yozgat, who was very close to us and also a collaborator in this investigation. And he's in fact the only one that saw the original position because the minute he saw his boy's son on the ground, he obviously rushed to him and tried to revive him. So he's the only one that can be relied upon to position the body in a precise way. So you've proved on different levels that Andreas Tami has to be at least a witness of this murder. Initially we had to show that he was there, right? So the login, log out, position him and now after release of more data, we know Andreas Tami is sitting at the computer at the time of the murder and we know that if he was sitting there and we know that on that place he would have heard, we know in some probability that he would have smelled, he would be a nose witness and we know that he would have seen the body. And now think about three senses and to miss each one of them, right? So let's say, let's grant that, you know, at that particular moment where the shot, where two shots happen and each one of the moment when one of those two shots happen, a glass fell to the floor and he might have missed it. Then he would have needed to miss also the two others. We are entering into a kind of a zone of diminished probabilities that are converging on zero. To make a very long story short, you showed your research at this year's documentary in Kassel at the city where Halit Joskot was also murdered and you produced this work which is part of an art exhibition but not an artwork, even though many people maybe perceived it as something like this in a way but I know you are not that much interested in these categories. Let's move away at this point towards what actually is forensic architecture if not an artist group. What else did you produce? And I would suggest that we start with, that we give a kind of short introduction into a couple of works that you have produced in the last couple of years. You also published a book recently called Forensic Architecture which is a kind of maybe a summary of what you have been doing until now in the context of forensic architecture. I was reading this book which I can really recommend, I can show it to you here. One of the most fascinating aspects about the advent of forensic architecture or the emergence of forensic architecture is maybe how you start this book. You start with a Holocaust denier, a name most of us are aware of, David Irving as his name. And there was a trial between David Irving, kind of pseudo historian in Holocaust denial and an American scholar called Deborah Lipstadt. And this trial started more or less in 1996 and ended in 2000 more or less and this is the end. Deborah Lipstadt won. It's allowed to call David Irving Holocaust denier. But Aaron maybe just introduce us to, what is the link between David Irving and the Holocaust deniers and their research, pseudo research and forensic architecture? So in general I like to enter into the dark side of even the kind of the practice that we are practicing for forensic architecture. And in there I showed a very disturbing but very interesting and very productive kind of historical example. A moment perhaps the trial where architectural details were discussed in the most intense way and that there was the most intense stakes on them. And that was the Holocaust denial trial. So you see Holocaust denial, this group of anti-Semite, largely anti-Semite, pseudo historians had a problem. And the problem was that already or still in the 90s many of the witnesses were alive. And what they needed to do was to shift the discourse from memory to matter and to discredit those witnesses. So they were saying the witnesses are lying or deluded, they cannot be trusted. On the one hand they would say well traumatized witnesses always make errors, which is also correct. On the other hand there was even worse they were saying they were just wanting to make a gain out of it. So that was very ugly. And in fact what they have done though was to look at things that other people simply did not look at previously. And that was the materiality of the remains at the archeology. Now the first Holocaust denies were obviously the Nazis themselves as they were conducting genocide. They were destroying the documents, they were destroying the elements. And obviously after completing their task they were removing any evidence so that any of those things were happening. So it was very complicated to do it. In Auschwitz Birkenau which was evicted in about January 1945 as the Red Army was moving in from the east, the Nazis were in fact bombing the entire facilities, burying them, and burning the entire archive of documents. Only two things were spared from this kind of destruction of evidence. One is that they forgot about the architectural archive. So one of the sellers of the planning office of the archive, the entire architectural drawings survived and to this day provided an incredibly useful resource to historians. On the other hand the dynamites in one of the crematoriums, in one of the gas chambers did not fully operate and was not fully destroyed. And this is the ruin that you see above, the crematorium twine in Birkenau that became all of the sudden the biggest topic of discussion. And therefore every element of that ruin, the archaeology that they were applying to it was extremely disturbing but extremely intense. And it was at some point necessary for the defence to actually counter it with real archaeology, not with pseudo-archaeology. This is what was happening there in the trial. A material analysis of every brick and every element of it. Could one say that the pseudo-material analysis of the Holocaust in the US put the discipline of historiography under pressure to also come up with proofs? Absolutely. Could one say that Holocaust in the US changed the discipline of historiography? Absolutely. I think that if you look at the history of the Holocaust, you would see that in the very first years until the 70s or so was written based on the documents that were, it was a kind of a documentary practice. Later starts a phase where it becomes a testimonial practice. At the beginning nobody speaks to the survivors. It becomes very much a testimonial practice after the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 kind of culminates maybe in Shoah by Lanzmann. And then start the third phase, the material practice, which coincided also with the dying of the witnesses. So in fact nobody was looking at the archaeology of it. And the necessity to respond and counter and stop Holocaust denial on that stage led a lot of serious scholars to start looking at those sites, not as memorial sites, but as epistemological resources. What knowledge exists in those stones? How we can understand the way the building was blown up? What we can learn by looking at the materiality of traces within that building and the architecture within it? And in fact the biggest question in the trial and in relation to Crematorium II in Birkenau was the presence or non-presence of four holes on the roof of that building. And the logic of deniers was demonic but kind of logical according to their own elliptical logic. They said that they cannot find the holes on the ceiling. And it's obvious that any witness described that the poison, the cyclone B was actually introduced into the building through four holes on the roof. And those holes simply do not clearly exist, although you see the state of the ruin is such that they couldn't have. And they said, well, if there were a hole on the roof it wasn't a gas chamber. And if that was not a gas chamber Auschwitz was not an extermination camp. And without Auschwitz as an extermination camp the Holocaust did not happen. And without the Holocaust the entire political architecture of the post-war era, the UN, the UN Convention of Human Rights, the Geneva Convention, et cetera, rest on nothing, right, on this presence or absence of these holes. And finally those holes were found, et cetera, et cetera. But it was, there are quite intense exchanges between Robert Jan van Pelt and an architectural historian and Irving on this. I mean, we can speak about it for a long time. I don't know how much time we have, but I think we can move or we should move here to a kind of second relative degree zero of your research of forensic architecture, which is the case around Josef Mengele's car, which was found in Brazil. And you published a book together, yeah, you published a book together with Thomas Keenan on Mengele's car, on, and the subtitle of this book is The Atron of Forensic Architecture. What does this? Forensic aesthetics, yeah. Forensic aesthetics, sorry. What does this car has to do with forensic aesthetics? It's another long story and it makes it sounds like all a worker about Nazis, which is not really the case. But the story of Mengele was fascinating because we needed to look for another moment of shift between two types of historical discourse. One tuned to subject, that is, people, their memories, and another tuned to object, that is, material remains or bones or buildings. And we found in Mengele's car a story, or the controversy, the scientific political controversy around Mengele's car, a kind of a political hinge. In fact, both Mengele and Eichmann were close to each other in Buenos Aires when the Mossad captured Eichmann and, in fact, wanted to capture Mengele, not Eichmann. And one of them got tried in Jerusalem and the other died in captivity. And one of them, Eichmann is, or the trial of Eichmann is, thought of as the moment in the history of human rights when the witness comes, the victim as a witness is allowed to speak. So if you think about it in the Nuremberg trial, survivors were not allowed to speak. Jackson, the prosecutor, thought that there would be too hysteric, that they're unreliable, and that there's enough document to run the trial on. Only in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 61, for the first time, the witnesses, the victims are allowed to speak. And then there's a lot of kind of return of various personal experience and trauma, et cetera, enters into our understanding also of human rights. And the whole testimonial practice of human right group owes itself to that moment in time. With Mengele, something else happens. They need to identify whether it's Mengele or not. And there was a quite brilliant German pathologist, Richard Helmer from Kiel, who has developed that technique of face-scarred superimposition. You can see it here where projecting an image of the face on the scar and sort of material investigation of the scar was allowed a kind of a new technique or new science of identification to emerge. And what that was, was that when that was done in the middle of the 80s, around 85, was the time that there were tens of thousands of disappeared people in all around South America. And people were digging them out in Argentina, mainly, but they couldn't be identified. DNA was not yet available, but the techniques developed to identify Mengele's scar to say that it seemed to match it, allowed to identify later many more missing people. Mengele was just one more missing people in South America at the time. So the kind of paradoxical moment is that it allowed forensics as a counter practice, as an activist practice. And the people that were digging out disappeared were doing them on their own accord because in Argentina at the time they were not allowed to do it. The state would not do it. Everyone wanted to forget about it. And they just dug them out of unmarked graves and identified them and later brought evidence against the dictatorship. So I thought that in, so then, you know, a few years later DNA was already doing the job. You did not need to be tuned to the texture and form of bones. But I thought that something in it was materially fascinating because the attention to the form and texture of calcium in the bones of people was translated later to forensic architecture. So the forensic anthropology as the identification of human remains moved completely digital with the DNA. And that skill of reading cracks and reading backwards, who it is and the history of that bone, because a bone is like a photograph that is exposed to life, like a photograph is exposed to light. It is continuously registering what you eat, what's the humidity of the place where you are. You can read it like a document. And that was for us a moment to translate it into forensic architecture. The attention to texture and form went there. So let's move from bones to buildings and let's have a look at one of the works of forensic architecture, a sequence of works actually under the title of drone strikes. You did a lot of research on drone strikes not only in Pakistan, but also in Pakistan. And this is one of the research projects you conducted there. What could you contribute as a researcher trained in the field of architecture to counter forensics in the context of drones? Well, first of all, that was the moment of transformation for us. So I mean, you've heard kind of my, you presented some of my books and ideas before. So I was more or less an architectural writer, an architectural scholar. It is really with this project that the agency begins almost kind of by chance because we meet the UN special rapporteur for human rights and he's telling us, look, there is the secret drone strikes campaign by the US in North Waziristan in Pakistan. And the CIA was killing thousands of people, but denying that they've done so, right? So they were like denialists. They were killing thousands of civilians, but whenever they were asked about it, they said we can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of those strikes. This is called a glomer response, which is a contemporary mode of denial. And the UN special rapporteur came to us and said, look, there is the problem is what I do get from those are photographs. They're very, very few because the Americans were not only denying they were putting a siege around that area. They were not allowing photograph to be taken out or in Waziristan. But those that came out have all the same signature and that was an architectural one. And he says, by looking at that, maybe you can just take a look at those photographs of those buildings and tell us what is taking place. Some of these images you're talking about, right? Absolutely. So this is the first clip that was smuggled out of Waziristan. It was about 43 seconds long. He recorded it on a smartphone and in order to get out of Waziristan, he had to pass through six hands to break through a siege line. And basically what he showed was a rather indistinct pile of rubble. But understanding the precarity, understanding the commitment of those people in smuggling this evidence out, we decided to look very, very, very, very carefully at it. So imagine 43 seconds, 25 frames a second, and we were looking at it for about half a year continuously. And this is just one sequence that you want to show off it where we were starting to notice some chipping on the wall in that room. You see here the hole in the ceiling through which the drone rocket came in. And then we start mapping out all the shrapnel pieces, you know, the explosion on the wall. And very, very carefully kind of like looking at whatever is registered on the architecture until we realized that here on the back there were areas that had much fewer shrapnel bits. And we understood them to be the shadow of the people that died in them. But what you see here is a photograph. It's a photograph, the people that were in that room, a photograph on the wall of that building. The wall of the building is like a negative that is exposed to the blast of the strike. So what we needed to do was actually to expose the particular munition that was used by the CIA. And to show it was an architectural munition, a munition that is penetrating through layers and layers of building designed to strike building. And here we used another, you see we used often a lot of cultural and art venues to fund our one-to-one reconstruction. That was on the occasion of the Venice Biennale for the first time. We actually built it one-to-one in order to establish the point of the blast. The point of the blast allowed us for a process that now we don't have time to discuss to identify precisely the new missile that was unacknowledged, that was a delay fuse missile. Other missile would blast at contact with the floor and the location of the people that died in it. Your research project of yours is called Rafa Black Friday. Here you came up with a research about smoke, clouds. Please tell us more about what you showed with this project, what you proved actually with this project. So very briefly we were not allowed, you know, whenever we investigate. So this was now a few projects on. By that time we already an agency. So after the drone strike investigation was presented in the UN General Assembly, it received quite a lot of attention. We have exposed various elements of the campaign, the pattern of its. So we started receiving all of the sudden more and more commissions. Then Amnesty International at the beginning of the Gaza war asked us to investigate one day, 24 hours cycle during Israeli bombing of Gaza at the time. And our instinct as researchers is always we need to go there. Of course, just like in Pakistan, whenever a government undertake crimes, they also block that area or they also hide the evidence about it. So you could see whatever pattern was with the Fafasun shirts is there with the American CIA and now with the Israeli military that does not allow human rights groups or journalists to enter Gaza at the time. But what existed in Gaza at the time was it was the first war that there was enough of smartphones available at the time. And it was kind of the images that emerge out of Gaza imagine a cycle of whenever electricity was allowed into the strip and whenever it was cut. So for days, there was no electricity and people phones were kind of dying down. Then it was like two hours. Then you have a batch of kind of images coming out. And during those 24 hours, which was for other reason the most violent ones in the conflict, there was a lot of images. But these are clips, each one of those is moving. But the thing is that we think that seeing all that stuff allows you to, you can maybe just put it in the background as I speak, maybe without sound. We think that simply having a lot of material, a lot of clips, a lot of images would allow us to clarify things. But actually what we need is a very patient, very systematic, very committed practice of honoring the risk that people took in order to record those things and look at them carefully. Now you know that when images arrive on social media, YouTube, on Facebook, etc., the metadata is stripped out. So you don't know where and when they were taken. And what we needed to reconstruct was precisely that. And we realized that the best way to do it was not looking at the earth, not looking at the shadows as we often do, but looking at the clouds. So we mapped out all the bomb clouds that existed in all those images. Many of those images, because Israel was bombing so much during that day, had a lot of bomb cloud in the air. So we synced them all up effectively. And we're able to create, we can just move forward. Here is a kind of shadow analysis technique. And here you see, you would see here how we are just effectively mapping the clouds and then capturing one cloud that we see on elevation. We see it here in plan, sorry for the architectural speak, but that allows us to sync up because we know the time on a satellite image. So now we know the time in this image. And now we could create a kind of converter, a kind of Rosetta stone that translates cloud shape into digital time. And then whenever we would see each one of those bomb clouds, we know exactly what time it is. Whenever we see a different angle, we would know from where it was taken. And if I skip further, you see how one can build a timeline precisely by syncing up all the clouds. And after we were looking at the clouds, we could turn our gaze into the earth part of the image, work with witnesses and reconstruct the events that happen on the ground with the witnesses, which is what in fact mattered most. And what you see here is architecture functioning as an optical device. The only way to make sense of all those images is to build an architectural model, a very basic one as you can see, and locate each one of the images within it and see the relationship within them. You can't really understand images through montage, through the kind of the classic principle of sticking them together into a film. But what you need to do is to navigate between them. You need to look at them three dimensionally. And architecture is the only way effectively to view images. There's no other alternative. I mean, here you would see in a second our attention to clouds led us to, in fact, be able also to see a very disturbing element in the sky. When you look at frame by frame, we start seeing the bombs before they were falling on the ground. And knowing exactly where they fell, we could actually intersect the plane of where they were, measure that photographic plane, measure the bombs, and the lawyers wanted to know which bombs they were, because that went to the International Criminal Court, et cetera. So we could put a grid behind them and actually measure the size of the bombs, and then go through the catalog and chase the supply chain off them and actually find the exact bomb that was used in theirs captured simply in a kind of 1.25 of a second. But you don't see that. If you just look at the film, you need to really look at the, and here we do some fluid dynamics on the clouds in order to understand their transformation so we can sync the entire day. So all of that is online and in the book, and you can look at it. I suggest that we move on to a more recent project on a kind of torture prison in Damascus or close to Damascus called Zad Naya, where who commissioned you and what did you find out and what was the research problem here? So prison and prison experience is really one of the limit conditions of architecture. It's really the moment where a building is not only the location of torture or violation, but it's the instrument of the crime. The building is just one of, like any other instrument of torture, perhaps the most important one of that. After the civil war began in Syria, more and more reports about a horrific secret in the sense that no international observers, no human right group, no journalists were ever allowed to visit that prison existed. The prison of Zad Naya, there were very few survivors, a lot of people, there were mass executions there that are taking place. But the Amnesty International managed to find five refugees in Turkey, Syrian refugees, that survived the hell of Zad Naya. And they wanted to, in fact, to give testimony. And then a problem emerges. And that's a problem that is often happening in human right context. The closer you get to the traumatic event, the further away from a precise description you're able to give. There's all sort of lacuna, there's all sort of repetition that start happening when you get closer to the pain. However, they really wanted to undergo this process and after a lot of explanation of what it would require and what it would involve, Amnesty commissioned us to do that. We traveled to Turkey and we undertook two experiments. One was architectural. We asked them to effectively build with us in a very, very systematic, slow manner, the rooms of the prison as they could remember them to be. You can just play that. Yeah, so we could just leave it in the background. You can see the process. And the other was sound. And we were working with one of our members, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, who is a sound artist and developed a technique of sound profiling and echo profiling by which he was playing various tones to the refugees and they were kind of identifying the right sort of acoustic frequency. And the reason was that they were led into that prison blindfolded. So many of them had not even seen anything in it. Their experience was at the threshold of vision and at the threshold of sound because also they were not allowed to speak or to shout when they were tortured. So it was again a kind of an experiment into the limit condition of the sensorium. And well, the result was quite astounding because it was not as if we were building an architectural memory from people's recollection. In fact, what we were doing was building the memory through architecture. So different elements that they could model for us, the size of the floor tiles, the height of windows. So a very mundane thing, all of a sudden would spring up with a recollection that was previously repressed and allowing that memory to rebuild together with the rebuilding of the model. And that kind of shows, well, I mean, there's a big discussion obviously to be had about the relationship between memory and architecture and trauma, et cetera, from the art of memory, so the Renaissance or the classic art of memory onwards. But here there was a kind of a digital version of it that kind of combines sound and architecture. And here is a little example. With this actually we should hear. I'm going to go through it again. This is all on our website and I think you should give that work the attention that it deserves if you want to see it. Our modeller, a Palestinian woman called Hania Jamal is asking the detainee simply to model for her the hatch in the door. And he was just saying that the hatch is bigger than his face. And she asked him how come or how come he knows about it. And then he remembers the most horrific. Okay. Okay. I mean this is a very short snippet from a longer piece where you could see that the modeling, this small architectural element is kind of an entry point into the most traumatic memory that this detainee has remembered. And you understand architecture's power in not only as material evidence but as a way of communication, as a way of entering as a memory device, an entry point into recollection. This is very important. And I think that also the response to that was because that became rather prominent. Investigation was widely reported. And again the same kind of denial that we heard from the Fofas and Shots, from the CIA, from the Israeli military, we now heard from Assad who was saying in a very similar way, you know, just like the people supporting Assad, to some extent Assad himself, you know, I showed you this video today, we decided not to show it, but you could have seen now half as a lot that actually kind of responding to this thing. But part of the accusation we received was that we are artists, that we are architects, that this is not serious evidence, etc. And let's move at this point from the denial of Assad and Syria to maybe obviously a denial strategy in Germany. And let's come back to the NSU trial. I think we now got a pretty good impression what forensic architecture is doing amongst other projects. And I think we stopped when we were talking about the NSU trial and the NSU complex at the moment when you presented your work at the documentar. You proved, at least if we follow the opinion of many people, that Andreas Temme, the member of the Verfassenkschutz, has to be a witness, had to be a witness of the murder of Haled Jaskat. You presented it at the documentar and now let's talk about what happened then. What was the reaction to your piece? No, first of all, just to say that the documentar was an extremely important forum for us. When you are in the business of counter forensics, you don't have the courts. And in fact, we can speak about it later. Our invitation to the court was actually canceled, although we were initially asked to present here in Munich. You do not have the official channels of truth speaking. And you need to find alternative forums. Also when we take evidence against the CIA or the Israeli government, there is no court. There's no court that easily can deal with that kind of evidence. It's a much more chaotic field. It's not really organized and bureaucratic system of justice. We put that in the documentar, obviously together with the tribunal people and the invitation of the documentar, but precisely because we thought that the German public need to see it, that it's not a bureaucratic rendering of truth, but that evidence need to be made public. And the reason it was the documentar being as popular as it is seemed to us like the right approach. And in fact, it caught because the Hessen parliamentary inquiry started to sit on that case. And Hessen is obviously where Kassel is. And there are big questions to be answered, particularly about the fact that the Hessen Ministry of the Interior and Sport in charge of the Fafasungschutz has put 120 years' ban on the file. So the Fafasungschutz itself has investigated it. The Fafasungschutz itself knows who the contact of Andres Temer are. And they have decided to put 120 years' ban. 120 years' ban would mean that by 2134, so hold the suspense, by that time we would know what this guy was doing there. Now if he was, if there's nothing about it, why should they put the ban till that date? It's kind of a panic reaction when CIA secrets are about 50 years, nuclear secrets about 35 sometimes, five generations of Germans and also the family itself would not live to know the truth. And the father of Halitios Gert, Ismailios Gert, continuously say, I do not believe Andres Temer. I think he either knows about who the killers are or he's himself involved in it. The fact is that those questions need to be put to rest, right? So it's not simply showing the evidence, it's fighting for them. In counter forensics you need to really, you need to know that you enter into an arena when the truth is established by a conflict and you need to be ready to get some counter punches, right? As I said, you know, we had all along with the other examples that I had before. So that was called into the parliamentary inquiry and Andres Temer was invited to come to Vizpad and I think, is that the capital of? Yes. To actually be screened the document, so we passed them the file and they screened that film and Andres Temer was there to look at it. However, before it was screened, the CDU faction in the Hessian parliamentary inquiry and remember that Hessian is, you know, the government is CDU, the Bouffier who was the interior minister at the time and was involved in putting also later the ban is now the prime minister or the leader of, what do you say? Minister president. Of Hessian, so the CDU was determined to sabotage and to stop each and every attempt to open the file and to make the truth be known. And because they cannot confront it on substantial level, what they've done is to produce a very fierce attack on forensic architecture. So they did not want it screened in the parliamentary inquiry. They did not want Temer to be confronted with it and all of the sudden they've magicked, which I don't know exactly how and from, a 50 page counter-counter forensic report. A report countering line by line everything that we said. Now the playing field was not leveled because they had, as the other parties in the parliamentary inquiry suspected all along, a close contact, etc., with other information. All of the sudden that material comes out. That produce another timeline, another time, you remember the time codes in the internet, the login, log out of the phone and the internet. All of the sudden another document come. This time it's not by the castle police, by the boss force. This is the task force of the federal police in Germany that had slightly different time codes and they're blaming us for getting the time wrong and various other things. I'll speak about the others later. By doing that, A, by producing that account, which I do not know who in the CDU would produce would know anything about forensics to do that, it could be, it was suggested that perhaps it was passed on to them. It was an unsigned document. In forensics, unsigned documents are completely worthless. You need to know who produced it. They did not produce the name. They said we are not producing the name. Here is an unsigned document in which we show scientifically that forensic architecture are just an artist group and that all are their experiment is wrong. Who passed it on to them? What does that reveal on their relation? Second, they've produced this boss force report with different time codes. It didn't work, although the linker patai kind of was taken aback, the espede pushed it and said that is our evidence now and submitted it as a request. Part of the film was screened. Andrestem was confronted in it. When he saw this bit where he is looking with this 3D model, his only complaint was I am the main actor in this film. How come I do not get royalties or they don't ask my permission for it? The pressure is still on and I think that effectively they have somehow revealed their hand. This nice guy is Bellino, one of the... He is a business leader of the CDU faction in the Hessische Landtag. Yes, and in fact, I believe you. I try to pre-prepare. Yes, so he is kind of like a big sort of nemesis in this story. And I think it's worth kind of looking at the accusation that he raises. So first of all, he says we are... To submit an art piece, to submit a documentary art piece into the parliamentary inquiry is almost like sacrilege, you almost kind of like produce something. You contaminate the field. Those fields should be held separate. The field of cultural production, the field of cultural analysis if you like. And the serious grown-up, right? So the kids should play in the documenta and let the grown-up decide in the room. Then there's several other... Here is... I don't know if you have it. Oh, sorry. Do you have the other? Yeah. So here is... This is just the first page of their report. You obviously don't need a translation that I've done for non-German speakers. The Hessische CDU, maybe one should mention, produced a 40-page Gutachten, which is not public. Exactly, yeah. This is what we suspect because it was unsigned. We suspect somebody has passed it on to them. We do not know until they do not reveal the name of the person that produced it, it's valueless because we need also to check the credential of that person. But in fact, if you look at the kind of complaints they have, that first of all, that it's a tribunal, right? The word tribunal means that we already marked the target and etc., etc. It's a kind of misunderstanding of the power of civil society initiative to question the very institution of states. And then he says, we are not state certified. Of course we are not. We're questioning the state. This was not invited to court. Of course not. It questioned the very legal process. This is not official evidence but leaks. Well, this is how investigations are done these days by leaks and of course the worst accusation of all that we are architects and artists and also creative people, which seems to me the most kind of debased, this kind of left for the last. But in fact, we think that civil society needs to take over, need to act in a non-certified way, need to take over the means of production in the sense of evidence production, need to use the kind of intelligence of architects and also of artists and filmmakers. When we are doing films or when we're looking at films, of course, we would work with filmmakers. We will also work with scientists. It is the interdisciplinarity. It's the self-authorized nature of that project that we think make it important. The fact is that the Tzedew has still defended Temer on very, very shaky ground and they know that they do that. This is why all that kind of thunderstorm of banal accusation are kind of flying our way. They are resting on nothing. We can show clearly his scene. He's hurt. He might have smelled. We know that now that he's sitting in his chair at the time of the killing because the new Bosphorus Report timing exclude even the possibility he's left the shop. To be in a position like that and to rely on micro percentages of possibilities and on ad hominem attacks, on attack on civil society, ban the Tzedew party, on civil society, on their own people, the people's tribunal. Human activists, the family members that are involved with that. This is really, I find in that language, a disrespectful and humiliating response to the action and to the just demand of civil society and the family to know the truth before 2134 was it. To rely on the fact that he might have not heard by some miracle of acoustics or etc. It's just unreasonable. In fact, I think that German society deserves to know that and more than anyone else, the family. Thank you very much. Before we open up the discussion, I'm sure there are many questions here. I wanted to finish by saying that you reacted to the Tzede-Ugutachten with an open letter that I can really highly recommend to read. It's on your website, forensic architecture website. There's one sentence I would like to read before we start with the discussion. Quote, it should be concerning to every citizen of Hessen that such a report which cites no expert witness and no methodology should be used to disrupt the efforts of independent investigators to read the truth of a nationally significant matter. We believe that the Joss Gottfemmeli, the citizens of Hessen and Germany, as well as European civil society in general, deserve more from their elected representatives. At this point, I would like to open up the discussion. I'm not sure if we have a microphone for the questions. Yes, we have. Do we have any questions or comments? Sorry, the light here. Anna Maria Meister, please. Please use the microphone. Thanks. Okay, thank you for your talk and the conversation, which I think everybody realizes is a very important one. I have two questions. One is an epistemological one. I think I went to the trial for a while in the summer and Temmys lies came up in several different ways. He lied about all sorts of things, not just his witnessing, but one way the judge at one point or I think one of the judges at one point dismissed another motion by the Liebenklager, so the families of the victims, lawyers, was to say that in a German criminal trial, the assumption of, by asking a witness, is the assumption of trust. You ask a witness what they tell you. You later judge in your own considerations, but you assume they speak the truth. If they say they cannot remember, you assume that they cannot remember. The problem with proving that somebody didn't see something or that somebody should have seen something is that subjective personal experience cannot be proven. There's several studies on how either distracted or focused or something you could be and not see things that anybody else in the same situation would have seen or that you wouldn't have heard something that anybody else would have heard. It's an epistemological question and I think this is the only work that I know of you anyway where the outcome of the expertise is proving someone's subjective experience rather than using subjective experience to prove something else. I wonder if that, I mean we talk about probability, but the question is an epistemological one, what do you do with the subject, if we have to assume that subjective experience is subjective, what would you say to the judge when he says, well, I cannot prove, you cannot prove to me that the witness has seen something because you can prove that it was there or that it happened, but you cannot prove that he perceived it or experienced it. It's an important question and obviously this is something that we encounter very often when, as I said, when we speak to traumatic witnesses. Another one of the interviews that we just decided to take out is discussing memory errors of witnesses and how important it is to be tuned to the errors of traumatized witnesses. Sometimes precisely in the wrong description of the space, and there was a testimony of one of those refugees, survivors of Sa'dnaya, who we know was tortured in, because by that time we figured out the building more or less, we knew that the place where he was tortured was a corridor and was a straight corridor, but he told us it was a spherical, circular space and rather than dismiss this testimony, we thought that in the error of recollection exists more important to even information in the correct Hortesian description because it includes also a subjective traumatized experience. So there's a lot of literature on memory failures, memory distortions of traumatized victims. It would be a stretch to call Temer at that moment a traumatized witness to an act of violation. However, you're right. When the first shot happened, somebody could have dropped a cup of coffee. When the second shot happened, somebody could have just, you know, dropped a chair and when he was going to that place, he might have gotten fly in his eye. Who knows, right? For all those things to have happened in a sequence, you're entering a zone of diminished probability. You cannot, every finding in physical science, natural science has a margin of probability. Right? Sometimes the margin of probability, the scientists would say, well, this phenomenon I've identified in the margin of probability is 10%. Sometimes they would say this is 0.1%. It doesn't exist, the finding without a margin of probability. The thing is, how do you calibrate the margin of probability to the question that is being asked now? If this was a criminal trial of Temer, and Temer would have been convicted of murder, according to that, you could rely as a plausible defense on such small crumbs of probability. If you agree with me, we're speaking about very, very promiles, right? Of probability that all those things happen in a sequence precisely when he was there to have seen that. That depends on the judge's own interpretation of what is reasonable and unreasonable. There's also, remember, unreasonable, there's reasonable doubt, right? There's also doubt that is unreasonable because the legal domain understand that there is no 100% probability on anything. There's a misunderstanding of the function and nature of evidence here. This is not a criminal trial of Temer, and he would not be convicted of murder if we show that he heard seen and perhaps smelled. What we need to show is that there is a very serious probability that he hasn't, and that there is great public interest in opening the file. The public interest is the interest of the family, of their support, of the community, and of German civil society, to know who he was speaking to, what he was doing, not only, as you said, in that show, et cetera. Of course, we entered into that kind of like, entered with the molecular level of that case precisely because we found, or we thought, that there is a possibility, this is the most vulnerable, that's the place where the state is most vulnerable. We entered full force into it. Of course, we are civil society organization with limited means. We need to choose our battles, and we chose it here. One is a question of probability. The other is a question of perception. I think that, again, you need to calibrate the doubt to the question, and what is at stake within that. Law, the truth, history need to assume the possibility that we share a common world, that we share at least a basic perception of the world in which we are together. Without that, without the materiality of the world that we can share, that is a world, this is a chair, this is a chair that is falling, this is a body, there's a hole in the head of that body. There's no politics, politics is not possible. We need to agree, we need to know how the social contract is calibrated to the way that we can describe the world around us. If we are to open all those levels of doubt, we'll become atomized individuals in completely individualistic self-perception, without the possibility of common action and common perception. Of course, history is a common project. History is what we can all agree is the truth around a particular event, and it will change when more evidence will become available. That's the beauty of it. Also in that case, our conclusion has changed. The more information came into the public domain, and in fact, more information came into the public domain precisely because of the, or partly because of the provocation that we have undertaken and the response, the counter slap, if you get slapped from somebody, they already reveal a lot. That was our experience in all our cases. Thank you very much. Do we have more comments or questions? Yes, please. Utter Lecourne, please. Please use the microphone. Yeah. You have been collaborating or working with GOs or national organizations. Could you imagine a situation where you would be working for or with a government? Oh, never. No. I mean, this is absolutely, we have refused various attempts by governments. Sometimes they are like amazing commissions that I would love to. We were offered by the Polish government to examine the crash of the government plane in Russia and to have the opportunity to examine the black box. I mean, for any person in our field, that would have been an amazing thing to do technically and intellectually. However, the Polish government, the way it is, it's a tack on civil society, it's xenophobia, it's a regressive attitude, it's anti-Semitism is such that we would never work with them. But in principle, not with any other government, not also with so-called good government. We are civil society group. Our aim is to develop civil society group precisely to keep government a check. Do we have more questions or comments? Yes, please. Could you please use the microphone? You have a strong voice, yes? Okay, you don't work with the governments, but did you have a problem? Did you become problems with governments which you work in these cases, for example, Syria, Israel, US, Mexico? Well, you know, we just came back from Mexico and the level of precautions we had to take after working on the Ayotzinapa case, so the 43 disappeared students in Ayotzinapa was such that affected really our ability to actually travel back to the place where we wanted to present it to Ayotzinapa, to the school, to Iguala, to the place where it happened, simply because the civil society organization we worked with felt that they threatened to such a degree that we cannot do that. When we presented the Rafa report that I showed on the cloud in Jerusalem, in East Jerusalem, we received threats that somebody is going to come with a gun and shoot us. We had to move from one presentation place to another. We had to even take a Palestinian security company, which I don't know, it's almost a contradictory term, what's a Palestinian security company if it's in Israel? It's just a group of teenagers with black t-shirts. In every story there's another kind of possibility, other of interruption, of arriving at the evidence or actual intimidation, threats at the airport, traveling. Okay, thank you very much. I don't see any hands in the air right now. So as a just we close here, my last question to you, I would be, Daniel Libeskin once described the discipline of architecture as the only optimistic art form. You can't sell a house to a future client by saying everything is going to be worse. So there's a deep optimism in our discipline. Obviously you need to be an optimist to be productive. You are extremely productive. Where do you take your optimism from? It's probably the only thing I can agree about, it was Daniel Libeskin. I just thought I could never agree with anything, but this thing I would sign on to. I think that architecture allows us, not only architecture, I think that our role is, the possibility that we have as civil society, people in the kind of cultural sphere, in the creative fields in art, architecture, critical studies, you name it, our kind of amorphous interdisciplinary field, is not only there to deconstruct, to ask questions, to criticize, but actually to produce, we are able to produce bodies of knowledge, we are able to produce new insights into things. And I think it's kind of a possibility of slightly, not, I don't think all artists need to do that, but of opening up a possibility, an agency of what we can do and how we can make use of our criticality, of our analytic faculty, of our indexiality, of our ability to operate this and that software, and to edit films, etc., and to make exhibitions in a way that challenges the state in a rather poignant way, not only by problematizing what they say, but actually by proving them wrong. Thank you very much, I.L., for your work in general and your optimism in particular. Thank you very much. One second. One second.
 Thank you very much, Anlingo, for the nice introduction.  Thank you very much, Jörg Kopmann, for being our host.  It's a pleasure, a great pleasure for me and I'm sure for all of us to be back here again  and welcome also from my side to our guest this evening, Ile Weitzmann.  Before we start and we will jump in a minute right into the middle of the NSU complex,  let me allow a few introductory remarks.  And I'm saying this not only, I'm saying this mainly as a civil servant, as a beamter,  as we say in Germany.  And as a beamter you might know you are obliged to be politically neutral and for me it's,  I try to stick to this to a certain extent, but at the other hand it's on a day-to-day  basis more and more difficult to be silent.  And one of the events or processes that really appalled not only me but I'm sure many of  us is the NSU complex.  The NSU complex I'm definitely not talking about the NSU trial but the NSU complex.  So there's obviously a message in our title here already.  Obviously what the NSU complex invites us is to really think carefully about the potential  involvement of parts of German authorities in one of the most brutal murder series that  we had to witness in the last couple of years between 2000 and 2007 if even Angela Merkel  calls this a national disgrace we should be really alarmed.  And I think Ile Weitzmann together with his colleagues from forensic architecture contributed  to our state of alarm.  And I think it's very good and great that you hear that we can talk about some aspects  of your research which I think is highly important to discuss the events of the NSU murders in  a bigger context.  Today as some of us know is the 384th day of the NSU trial.  I heard from friends who were at the trial today that not too much happened today.  There will be continuation of the trial tomorrow morning.  I heard the key words interruptions, for Zögerungsanträge and so everybody is waiting for the statements  of the attorneys and the solicitors.  But there's a certain hope that the statements will start tomorrow but we are not sure yet.  I'm sure I'm really not an expert in the NSU trial itself but I'm sure later when we open  the discussion we will learn maybe something about what happened today and what we can  expect tomorrow.  I would like to start our dialogue, our conversation with giving you a quick overview.  We start right in the middle with the NSU complex.  We will talk about the 9th murder that forensic architecture in Eilweizmann had a very close  look at in particular.  Then we recapitulate some aspects of what forensic architecture has been doing in the  last couple of years and then we come back towards the end again to think about the consequences  of the research of forensic architecture for possible evolution and involvement of the  NSU trial.  Let's start with the beginning basically with the NSU trial, with the NSU complex I have  to say.  Obviously we are talking here with three official members of a so-called national socialist  underground, a so-called NSU, but there are so many hints that we shouldn't talk about  only these three people that we have to talk about more helpers than are on trial at the  moment.  Maybe I should mention before Eil introduces us to his work on the 9th murder of Haladi  Yoskat who had to die in the year 2007 I think, 2006 I'm sorry, that we have to talk about  potential involvement of members of the state.  Eil, you produced research around this especially around the 9th murder of the NSU.  How did this come about?  Who asked you etc.  So first of all thanks to you Stefan and to Andine for the invitation.  The commission really developed through a series of discussion with an organization called  Tribunal for Unraveling the NSU complex.  The fact that Tribunal, people's Tribunal had to be assembled was a feeling amongst some  of the activists concerned in this case, some of the family members of people that lost  their ones in the attacks and some members of the communities that felt persecuted by  it that the state dealing with that case was really inadequate.  And this is why they called the controversy the NSU complex.  It's not only a series of killings but a network of relations between different organizations  starting from the police then of course the Fafasumschütz then also the court.  So if the police effectively considered members of the family of the deceased to be suspects  and harassed them, the Fafasumschütz whose duty it is really, this is its reason of being  to protect those vulnerable in society from radical political violence, they haven't done  their job.  Not only have they not done their job, the community felt very much accused and vilified.  And then in the trial itself many of the members, many of the witnesses felt that the story  as they wanted to be heard, as they want to speak it is not really allowed to be spoken.  This is perhaps to do with the particularity of the criminal trial but also that the mandate  of that discussion was not really to open up the case on its full political social implications  but simply to look at the guilt or innocence of one individual who was still, the verdict  is not yet drawn.  So that initiative was formed and usually people's tribunal or citizens tribunal, institution,  popular institutions that ask for independent investigation.  They put demands to the state.  However in this case the decision was not to put demand to the state but actually to  take over investigation themselves.  That is to say civil society need to have the means and ability and perhaps resources,  perhaps the willingness to actually undertake forensic investigation.  It take on the means of production and because we were at a time known as an architectural  research agency that work with lawyers, with human rights groups all over the world, they  came to us.  Now they presented to us the entire case on all its complexities and discussion upon  discussions were undertaken but given that we have limited resources we decided to look  for the one case where the story seems to falter at the weakest point and put all our  resources in it.  And of course the Halit Yozgat case is the one in which there was a state agent present  at the scene of the crime and there was still an answered questions about what he was doing  there.  And of course even now that the trial is being concluded you could say more or less that the  other killings are resolved in a sense that you know who the killer is and you know the  motive.  That one murder is still unresolved because until the role of Andreas Temet in it is clarified  until we know why he is there you cannot say that that case is resolved.  So we decided to invest all our resources in those 77 square meters off the shop and  then 9 and a half minutes which is the time he spent on Andreas Temet spent in the shop,  interrogate him very deeply and from that hopefully to make a crack and then follow  the path of the crack outwards to make a political point.  And sometimes politics does not need to be done from the outside in, from the big picture  into the singularity but really like a biopsy or like acupuncture to press in on that particular  weak point and hopefully unravel what you can from that.  You produced research on different levels around this weak point around the murder of  Halid Joscat.  You produced one-to-one reenactments of the events but also of the spaces itself.  We will see them, some of them in a minute but you also produced them with film and maybe  while we have a look at this film you could give us a quick introduction into the context.  I hope this works.  So I mean basically just we need to understand what is I think before we enter into the particularities  of the case is what is counter forensics.  Obviously forensics is what the state does.  This is a mean of surveillance and control that the state apply onto its citizens.  Counter forensics is really kind of like suspended briefly so that we can introduce  it and then we can move on.  Is a way of inverting the forensic age.  The way in which civilians or citizens can look up at the crime of states.  The crime that we were looking here at is not the murder itself.  We were not trying to solve the question or address the question of who shot Halid Joscat  at about five o'clock on April 6, 2006.  What we wanted, the crime that we were looking at is the crime of perjury.  The lie of the Secret Service agent and Dres Temer when asked to describe what happened  in there.  So we are, it's a kind of asking, coming at the question from sideways if you like.  And one of the main resources that we had and as I think as you know the material that  counter forensics can work with is only open source material.  We do not have access to secret police files.  We do not have access to the Fafasung Schutz files.  What we had access to is the leak.  And there was a rather large dump, what we call data dump, of the entire castle police  investigation of that.  So we had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of documents written in German.  We had to work with a lot of people that can read them.  And from them what you see here is initially the basis of any architectural investigation.  We needed to build a model.  Now the shop doesn't exist anymore.  The shop was sold and was converted into urban beehive shops.  So you can raise your own bees kind of shop there now.  We were going there obviously buying some honey and looking at that place.  But also in the images that you're going to see in that clip are images that were leaked  out.  So here what we are applying is a very, very basic technique of constructing a 3D model  from photography, converting depth and distortion of images into a measured 3D model.  We'll just let it run.  So this is for example kind of a police file.  This is an image that existed in the police file and we were able pretty much to build  an exact model from it.  Obviously using also visits to the shop and satellite images, etc.  And what you see here that is Andreas Temmer sitting at his desk and this is the view that  he had of his computer.  And then what we realized very fast that we had to do, and again I'll kind of like stop  it briefly, but you saw, we can navigate back there, is that in order to conduct our experiments  we needed to develop a technique that looks simultaneously at a reconstruction in digital  space.  But then there is a category in forensics called ground truth.  The ground truth computer model is to anchor it in physical reality.  So we build a 3D, we build a one to one model and we build a 3D model on a computer and  every experiment we've done in both so that we could calibrate any result really in it.  And of course we had, but you need to build, how do you build a one to one shop, you know,  we didn't have a big budget, but we had our friends and I was working previously at the  Hakawe in Berlin, the house of world cultures and they were putting at our disposal their  space and stuff and we were building for less than a week, we build a one to one model,  we worked with actors, we reenacted again and again the same event.  I mean what you see here is the way that we have obstructed the physical model into a  digital one, replacing some of the elements working with acoustic engineers, a lot of the  tests as you will see later is to do with acoustics, replacing some of the Gibbs wall  with wood, always panels of glass that we were bringing in there until our scientists  were content that the level of ground truthing is precise enough, is that here?  Okay, yeah, so you see now how basically this is the place in Berlin, we did not open it  to, okay, that is gone, but so there was this, parts of the model were built very precisely,  you might see it in some of the further clips and we reenacted in fact the reenactment,  so we had Andreas Stemmer reenactment video and we treated the reenactment not as a representation  of the crime, but as the crime, okay, because if he is lying, a reenactment is the testimony  of the body and therefore there was a kind of reenactment of the reenactment to see what  we could learn about movement, you know, your testimony could be equally in speech and in  movement and that was our case.  This is by the way the leak files.  And this is well, right?  Yeah, these are the leak documents that were made public at the beginning of 2015 with  which we worked and here is, yeah, this is the.  This is the continuation of the video, here we see the selection of the spaces you made  and this is also, the fact that you didn't reconstruct everything but only a selection  of it was also for criticism of your work which we will discuss later, an entry point,  right?  You see, every act of representation is an act of obstruction, right?  Even in language when you say the word cat, right?  It's a kind of an obstruction of what the animal, the mammal cat is.  The question is how you calibrate your representation to be precise enough to answer your question  and that was worked out together with scientists who were content that the level of obstruction  was still reflective of the real space and we had a 3D model of the space as it was.  Now, you know, we were trying to be as precise as possible.  I mean, you might have seen already there, there's even the location of the ashtray,  the location of the telephone of the, you know, the coffee cup on the table when it  is very close to the murder and then the level of obstruction increases as you go towards  the periphery and that is part of this logic.  You were also very interested in time, obviously.  The whole piece that you presented then on the document this year is called 77 square  meters 9.26 minutes.  If it would be such a terrible story, we could call it a kamerspiel in German but maybe just  introduce us to the issue of time and this work.  It was a very contemporary killing in a sense that it happened in an internet, okay, internet  cafes are kind of like no longer kind of popular spaces but the problem that we have  in forensic architecture mainly speaking to witnesses is that witnesses especially to  traumatic events, especially witnesses to violence, these are the witnesses we speak  to often have a very good recollection of sequences of actions but sometimes problem  with duration.  Was it seven minutes?  Was it three minutes?  Was it 15 minutes?  It's sometimes that something that is not very clear.  However, a murder that happens in an internet cafe in the presence of five witnesses means  that all your witnesses are logged in.  So they are connected to a timer that is the timer of the computer and then the timer of  the internet, the timing of the internet.  And what we've done is construct a time space matrix.  We were building that space and then building the sort of the, if you like, the grid of  time of possibilities into which we were mincing and placing the different bits of testimony  into those boxes.  So you had a very kind of a 4D, if you like, architectural space, 4D, the last being time  in which we could reconstruct the choreography.  And in fact, some of our actors were kind of rather well trained in the kind of the choreographic  rhythm of responding to precise time.  And we've done it with actors who were trying to perform the set of actions that would require,  according to multiple scenarios, within that space.  But here you go.  If you murder somebody in an internet cafe, you need to know that the timings are going  to be more precise.  However, that was also a point of contention.  And as we will get to at the end of the evening, I suppose.  The aim of your research is obviously to prove that Andreas Temer at least had to be a witness  of the murdered Halled Joskat, if not more.  And you approached this proof on different levels with different senses, by the analysis  of different senses amongst them as sound.  And you produced this film.  Also, maybe you can say something about this here.  So effectively, our aim was to show that, well, we can let the gunshots in the background,  to show that Andreas Temer was in fact lying.  And to just kind of make a little perhaps technical point is to say, what is a witness?  Witness is a person that has a sensory contact with an event.  Obviously, it could be an eyewitness.  If you see something, it could be an ear witness.  If you hear something, you can even be a nose witness if you smell something.  And you need to be conscious of what it is that you've seen.  That makes you a witness.  You need to have a direct sensory contact to an event.  If you heard about somebody else's sensory contact, that is hearsay.  You're no longer a witness.  So we needed to show that Andreas Temer was a witness and was lying about not being a  witness.  And so in fact, it became a question of the senses.  It became a question of the limit of the senses.  What is the threshold of audibility?  What is the lowest sound that we can be sure would have been heard?  What is the threshold of smellability?  There was a big question about would Andreas Temer be able to smell the gunpowder?  Because when you shoot a gun in a closed room, you have the sulfur and ammonia in the gunpowder  still lingers in the room for a long time.  How do you calculate it?  How do you show it?  And what is the threshold of vision?  So the architectural model operated like a sensorium.  In fact, like a kind of a limit test to the threshold of the senses.  In fact, in architectural theory, we might call it like a phenomenological space or an  extreme phenomenological space.  Here we face with a very big problem.  We are counter-forensic people.  We're not a police.  How do you get guns?  How do you get the right sound of the Cheska gun?  In fact, if you go to the U.S. and especially in Arizona, when we went to, you can shoot  anything, almost with anyone.  And $5,000 was sent to America and that experiment was sent back by one of the most highly reputed  kind of forensic experts that usually present evidence in the U.S. criminal trial.  So you can see that.  And in fact, here also there's an act of translation.  He's shooting the, initially you heard the Cheska and now other guns.  32 with a wet suppressor.  But he was calibrating the sound of the Cheska gun to another on which he was also threatened.  He was calibrating the sound suppressor.  And we were taking the lowest possible sound that could come out of the gun in that case,  to be on the safe side.  Sending it to Berlin, getting...  Measurement one, high-level gun shot.  Would otherwise be...  Now.  Used in nightclubs.  Just a very high frequency.  Measurement end.  One.  Measurement two, high-level gun shot.  Start now.  So this is a forensic expert from Anderson Acoustics who is actually conducting it within  the space that we've built.  Within that.  And then again, as I said, every result was calibrated.  Measurement one, gun shot.  We can simply skip.  Start now.  And just see that the experiment was then repeated in a digital space and then calibrated  one to the other.  So you repeat it in two models.  We also, on a computer, we needed to build a model of the room as we knew it to be.  And a model of our model of the room to see how much our model, one-to-one model in the  Hakawein Berlin deviated from the digital model.  So there's like three layers of translation and calibration that goes in there.  And the result was rather obvious.  He would have heard it.  Okay.  This is the ear witness, Andreas Temmer.  But you just mentioned the nose witness, Andreas Temmer.  You also did a project here or a research experiment.  Yes.  This was a little bit more complicated because we knew also that in other cases the Uvers,  the Wurwunlose and Uwebunhar, the killers, was shooting the gun through a bag, for a  nylon bag.  The reason that in murder cases people do that is for the cartridges not to fall on  the ground.  But that would have affected, in a rather unpredictable way, the smell of it.  We did it anyway, assuming there was no bag, but we have caveated our result.  We said only if there is no bag, we can be certain that there would have been the smell.  I mean, I'm pretty, you know, I think in high probability that the smell would have still  lingered even with the bag.  Of course, the bag is torn when you shoot through it.  But that was beyond the capacity of our computers to actually calculate the variability of that.  Again, this is done simultaneously by looking at fluid dynamic by conducting an experiment  of the behavior of fluid dynamic elements within a room.  And later, I think this is coming now, that's not here, but we've repeated that digitally.  And finally, there's the eye witness, Andreas Tami of the murder.  And you produced here also a video.  I think the video is the next one.  So, yeah, I mean, as I said, what you see here, on the left, you would see the reenactment  video, which is in fact for us a video of the crime.  So, mostly what we do, we would look at different kind of violations that are captured on smartphones.  Maybe we will see some of those, Stefan, later.  Does it not work?  I think it's it.  Okay, yeah.  Yeah, yeah.  You can also kind of like skip forward a little bit or maybe I can do it.  So here is Andreas Tami.  Here is the space.  We motion tracked his eyes within the room and then did some of that also manually.  So we could figure out the place of his eyes and his head within the room at any given  moment by analyzing the video.  Then we have located a camera along that track that is based on our work with psychologists  of perception of what would be the reasonable angle from which you could actually perceive  things.  We've reduced it further to be more sure.  And what you see here on the left is the reenactment video, which is for us.  As I say, no, this is for us like a video of a bomb, right?  This is a video of the crime itself, not of a representation of the crime, because he  is now performing the crime of lying about not having perceived, right?  The left video, maybe I should mention this, you can watch on YouTube.  That's Andreas Tami's reenactment.  Yeah, yeah, but you see it over here on the left and then you can see him getting closer.  He's saying that he's looking for Halit Yozgat.  He cannot find him.  Now he's putting those famous coins on the table and the minute that he leans, we have  the position of the body in full sight.  Now where we have the position of the body from is from work, very close work together  with the father of Halit, with Ismail Yozgat, who was very close to us and also a collaborator  in this investigation.  And he's in fact the only one that saw the original position because the minute he saw  his boy's son on the ground, he obviously rushed to him and tried to revive him.  So he's the only one that can be relied upon to position the body in a precise way.  So you've proved on different levels that Andreas Tami has to be at least a witness  of this murder.  Initially we had to show that he was there, right?  So the login, log out, position him and now after release of more data, we know Andreas  Tami is sitting at the computer at the time of the murder and we know that if he was sitting  there and we know that on that place he would have heard, we know in some probability that  he would have smelled, he would be a nose witness and we know that he would have seen  the body.  And now think about three senses and to miss each one of them, right?  So let's say, let's grant that, you know, at that particular moment where the shot,  where two shots happen and each one of the moment when one of those two shots happen,  a glass fell to the floor and he might have missed it.  Then he would have needed to miss also the two others.  We are entering into a kind of a zone of diminished probabilities that are converging on zero.  To make a very long story short, you showed your research at this year's documentary  in Kassel at the city where Halit Joskot was also murdered and you produced this work which  is part of an art exhibition but not an artwork, even though many people maybe perceived it  as something like this in a way but I know you are not that much interested in these  categories.  Let's move away at this point towards what actually is forensic architecture if not an  artist group.  What else did you produce?  And I would suggest that we start with, that we give a kind of short introduction into  a couple of works that you have produced in the last couple of years.  You also published a book recently called Forensic Architecture which is a kind of maybe  a summary of what you have been doing until now in the context of forensic architecture.  I was reading this book which I can really recommend, I can show it to you here.  One of the most fascinating aspects about the advent of forensic architecture or the  emergence of forensic architecture is maybe how you start this book.  You start with a Holocaust denier, a name most of us are aware of, David Irving as his  name.  And there was a trial between David Irving, kind of pseudo historian in Holocaust denial  and an American scholar called Deborah Lipstadt.  And this trial started more or less in 1996 and ended in 2000 more or less and this is  the end.  Deborah Lipstadt won.  It's allowed to call David Irving Holocaust denier.  But Aaron maybe just introduce us to, what is the link between David Irving and the Holocaust  deniers and their research, pseudo research and forensic architecture?  So in general I like to enter into the dark side of even the kind of the practice that  we are practicing for forensic architecture.  And in there I showed a very disturbing but very interesting and very productive kind  of historical example.  A moment perhaps the trial where architectural details were discussed in the most intense  way and that there was the most intense stakes on them.  And that was the Holocaust denial trial.  So you see Holocaust denial, this group of anti-Semite, largely anti-Semite, pseudo historians  had a problem.  And the problem was that already or still in the 90s many of the witnesses were alive.  And what they needed to do was to shift the discourse from memory to matter and to discredit  those witnesses.  So they were saying the witnesses are lying or deluded, they cannot be trusted.  On the one hand they would say well traumatized witnesses always make errors, which is also  correct.  On the other hand there was even worse they were saying they were just wanting to make  a gain out of it.  So that was very ugly.  And in fact what they have done though was to look at things that other people simply  did not look at previously.  And that was the materiality of the remains at the archeology.  Now the first Holocaust denies were obviously the Nazis themselves as they were conducting  genocide.  They were destroying the documents, they were destroying the elements.  And obviously after completing their task they were removing any evidence so that any  of those things were happening.  So it was very complicated to do it.  In Auschwitz Birkenau which was evicted in about January 1945 as the Red Army was moving  in from the east, the Nazis were in fact bombing the entire facilities, burying them, and burning  the entire archive of documents.  Only two things were spared from this kind of destruction of evidence.  One is that they forgot about the architectural archive.  So one of the sellers of the planning office of the archive, the entire architectural drawings  survived and to this day provided an incredibly useful resource to historians.  On the other hand the dynamites in one of the crematoriums, in one of the gas chambers  did not fully operate and was not fully destroyed.  And this is the ruin that you see above, the crematorium twine in Birkenau that became  all of the sudden the biggest topic of discussion.  And therefore every element of that ruin, the archaeology that they were applying to  it was extremely disturbing but extremely intense.  And it was at some point necessary for the defence to actually counter it with real archaeology,  not with pseudo-archaeology.  This is what was happening there in the trial.  A material analysis of every brick and every element of it.  Could one say that the pseudo-material analysis of the Holocaust in the US put the discipline  of historiography under pressure to also come up with proofs?  Absolutely.  Could one say that Holocaust in the US changed the discipline of historiography?  Absolutely.  I think that if you look at the history of the Holocaust, you would see that in the very  first years until the 70s or so was written based on the documents that were, it was a  kind of a documentary practice.  Later starts a phase where it becomes a testimonial practice.  At the beginning nobody speaks to the survivors.  It becomes very much a testimonial practice after the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961  kind of culminates maybe in Shoah by Lanzmann.  And then start the third phase, the material practice, which coincided also with the dying  of the witnesses.  So in fact nobody was looking at the archaeology of it.  And the necessity to respond and counter and stop Holocaust denial on that stage led a  lot of serious scholars to start looking at those sites, not as memorial sites, but as  epistemological resources.  What knowledge exists in those stones?  How we can understand the way the building was blown up?  What we can learn by looking at the materiality of traces within that building and the architecture  within it?  And in fact the biggest question in the trial and in relation to Crematorium II in Birkenau  was the presence or non-presence of four holes on the roof of that building.  And the logic of deniers was demonic but kind of logical according to their own elliptical  logic.  They said that they cannot find the holes on the ceiling.  And it's obvious that any witness described that the poison, the cyclone B was actually  introduced into the building through four holes on the roof.  And those holes simply do not clearly exist, although you see the state of the ruin is  such that they couldn't have.  And they said, well, if there were a hole on the roof it wasn't a gas chamber.  And if that was not a gas chamber Auschwitz was not an extermination camp.  And without Auschwitz as an extermination camp the Holocaust did not happen.  And without the Holocaust the entire political architecture of the post-war era, the UN,  the UN Convention of Human Rights, the Geneva Convention, et cetera, rest on nothing, right,  on this presence or absence of these holes.  And finally those holes were found, et cetera, et cetera.  But it was, there are quite intense exchanges between Robert Jan van Pelt and an architectural  historian and Irving on this.  I mean, we can speak about it for a long time.  I don't know how much time we have, but I think we can move or we should move here to  a kind of second relative degree zero of your research of forensic architecture, which is  the case around Josef Mengele's car, which was found in Brazil.  And you published a book together, yeah, you published a book together with Thomas Keenan  on Mengele's car, on, and the subtitle of this book is The Atron of Forensic Architecture.  What does this?  Forensic aesthetics, yeah.  Forensic aesthetics, sorry.  What does this car has to do with forensic aesthetics?  It's another long story and it makes it sounds like all a worker about Nazis, which is not  really the case.  But the story of Mengele was fascinating because we needed to look for another moment of shift  between two types of historical discourse.  One tuned to subject, that is, people, their memories, and another tuned to object, that  is, material remains or bones or buildings.  And we found in Mengele's car a story, or the controversy, the scientific political controversy  around Mengele's car, a kind of a political hinge.  In fact, both Mengele and Eichmann were close to each other in Buenos Aires when the Mossad  captured Eichmann and, in fact, wanted to capture Mengele, not Eichmann.  And one of them got tried in Jerusalem and the other died in captivity.  And one of them, Eichmann is, or the trial of Eichmann is, thought of as the moment in  the history of human rights when the witness comes, the victim as a witness is allowed  to speak.  So if you think about it in the Nuremberg trial, survivors were not allowed to speak.  Jackson, the prosecutor, thought that there would be too hysteric, that they're unreliable,  and that there's enough document to run the trial on.  Only in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 61, for the first time, the witnesses, the  victims are allowed to speak.  And then there's a lot of kind of return of various personal experience and trauma, et  cetera, enters into our understanding also of human rights.  And the whole testimonial practice of human right group owes itself to that moment in time.  With Mengele, something else happens.  They need to identify whether it's Mengele or not.  And there was a quite brilliant German pathologist, Richard Helmer from Kiel, who has developed  that technique of face-scarred superimposition.  You can see it here where projecting an image of the face on the scar and sort of material  investigation of the scar was allowed a kind of a new technique or new science of identification  to emerge.  And what that was, was that when that was done in the middle of the 80s, around 85, was the  time that there were tens of thousands of disappeared people in all around South America.  And people were digging them out in Argentina, mainly, but they couldn't be identified.  DNA was not yet available, but the techniques developed to identify Mengele's scar to say  that it seemed to match it, allowed to identify later many more missing people.  Mengele was just one more missing people in South America at the time.  So the kind of paradoxical moment is that it allowed forensics as a counter practice,  as an activist practice.  And the people that were digging out disappeared were doing them on their own accord because  in Argentina at the time they were not allowed to do it.  The state would not do it.  Everyone wanted to forget about it.  And they just dug them out of unmarked graves and identified them and later brought evidence  against the dictatorship.  So I thought that in, so then, you know, a few years later DNA was already doing the  job.  You did not need to be tuned to the texture and form of bones.  But I thought that something in it was materially fascinating because the attention to the form  and texture of calcium in the bones of people was translated later to forensic architecture.  So the forensic anthropology as the identification of human remains moved completely digital  with the DNA.  And that skill of reading cracks and reading backwards, who it is and the history of that  bone, because a bone is like a photograph that is exposed to life, like a photograph  is exposed to light.  It is continuously registering what you eat, what's the humidity of the place where you  are.  You can read it like a document.  And that was for us a moment to translate it into forensic architecture.  The attention to texture and form went there.  So let's move from bones to buildings and let's have a look at one of the works of forensic  architecture, a sequence of works actually under the title of drone strikes.  You did a lot of research on drone strikes not only in Pakistan, but also in Pakistan.  And this is one of the research projects you conducted there.  What could you contribute as a researcher trained in the field of architecture to counter  forensics in the context of drones?  Well, first of all, that was the moment of transformation for us.  So I mean, you've heard kind of my, you presented some of my books and ideas before.  So I was more or less an architectural writer, an architectural scholar.  It is really with this project that the agency begins almost kind of by chance because we  meet the UN special rapporteur for human rights and he's telling us, look, there is the secret  drone strikes campaign by the US in North Waziristan in Pakistan.  And the CIA was killing thousands of people, but denying that they've done so, right?  So they were like denialists.  They were killing thousands of civilians, but whenever they were asked about it, they  said we can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of those strikes.  This is called a glomer response, which is a contemporary mode of denial.  And the UN special rapporteur came to us and said, look, there is the problem is what I  do get from those are photographs.  They're very, very few because the Americans were not only denying they were putting a siege  around that area.  They were not allowing photograph to be taken out or in Waziristan.  But those that came out have all the same signature and that was an architectural one.  And he says, by looking at that, maybe you can just take a look at those photographs  of those buildings and tell us what is taking place.  Some of these images you're talking about, right?  Absolutely.  So this is the first clip that was smuggled out of Waziristan.  It was about 43 seconds long.  He recorded it on a smartphone and in order to get out of Waziristan, he had to pass through  six hands to break through a siege line.  And basically what he showed was a rather indistinct pile of rubble.  But understanding the precarity, understanding the commitment of those people in smuggling  this evidence out, we decided to look very, very, very, very carefully at it.  So imagine 43 seconds, 25 frames a second, and we were looking at it for about half a  year continuously.  And this is just one sequence that you want to show off it where we were starting to notice  some chipping on the wall in that room.  You see here the hole in the ceiling through which the drone rocket came in.  And then we start mapping out all the shrapnel pieces, you know, the explosion on the wall.  And very, very carefully kind of like looking at whatever is registered on the architecture  until we realized that here on the back there were areas that had much fewer shrapnel bits.  And we understood them to be the shadow of the people that died in them.  But what you see here is a photograph.  It's a photograph, the people that were in that room, a photograph on the wall of that  building.  The wall of the building is like a negative that is exposed to the blast of the strike.  So what we needed to do was actually to expose the particular munition that was used by the  CIA.  And to show it was an architectural munition, a munition that is penetrating through layers  and layers of building designed to strike building.  And here we used another, you see we used often a lot of cultural and art venues to fund our  one-to-one reconstruction.  That was on the occasion of the Venice Biennale for the first time.  We actually built it one-to-one in order to establish the point of the blast.  The point of the blast allowed us for a process that now we don't have time to discuss to  identify precisely the new missile that was unacknowledged, that was a delay fuse missile.  Other missile would blast at contact with the floor and the location of the people that  died in it.  Your research project of yours is called Rafa Black Friday.  Here you came up with a research about smoke, clouds.  Please tell us more about what you showed with this project, what you proved actually  with this project.  So very briefly we were not allowed, you know, whenever we investigate.  So this was now a few projects on.  By that time we already an agency.  So after the drone strike investigation was presented in the UN General Assembly, it received  quite a lot of attention.  We have exposed various elements of the campaign, the pattern of its.  So we started receiving all of the sudden more and more commissions.  Then Amnesty International at the beginning of the Gaza war asked us to investigate one  day, 24 hours cycle during Israeli bombing of Gaza at the time.  And our instinct as researchers is always we need to go there.  Of course, just like in Pakistan, whenever a government undertake crimes, they also block  that area or they also hide the evidence about it.  So you could see whatever pattern was with the Fafasun shirts is there with the American  CIA and now with the Israeli military that does not allow human rights groups or journalists  to enter Gaza at the time.  But what existed in Gaza at the time was it was the first war that there was enough of  smartphones available at the time.  And it was kind of the images that emerge out of Gaza imagine a cycle of whenever electricity  was allowed into the strip and whenever it was cut.  So for days, there was no electricity and people phones were kind of dying down.  Then it was like two hours.  Then you have a batch of kind of images coming out.  And during those 24 hours, which was for other reason the most violent ones in the conflict,  there was a lot of images.  But these are clips, each one of those is moving.  But the thing is that we think that seeing all that stuff allows you to, you can maybe  just put it in the background as I speak, maybe without sound.  We think that simply having a lot of material, a lot of clips, a lot of images would allow  us to clarify things.  But actually what we need is a very patient, very systematic, very committed practice of  honoring the risk that people took in order to record those things and look at them carefully.  Now you know that when images arrive on social media, YouTube, on Facebook, etc., the metadata  is stripped out.  So you don't know where and when they were taken.  And what we needed to reconstruct was precisely that.  And we realized that the best way to do it was not looking at the earth, not looking  at the shadows as we often do, but looking at the clouds.  So we mapped out all the bomb clouds that existed in all those images.  Many of those images, because Israel was bombing so much during that day, had a lot of bomb  cloud in the air.  So we synced them all up effectively.  And we're able to create, we can just move forward.  Here is a kind of shadow analysis technique.  And here you see, you would see here how we are just effectively mapping the clouds and  then capturing one cloud that we see on elevation.  We see it here in plan, sorry for the architectural speak, but that allows us to sync up because  we know the time on a satellite image.  So now we know the time in this image.  And now we could create a kind of converter, a kind of Rosetta stone that translates cloud  shape into digital time.  And then whenever we would see each one of those bomb clouds, we know exactly what time  it is.  Whenever we see a different angle, we would know from where it was taken.  And if I skip further, you see how one can build a timeline precisely by syncing up all  the clouds.  And after we were looking at the clouds, we could turn our gaze into the earth part of  the image, work with witnesses and reconstruct the events that happen on the ground with  the witnesses, which is what in fact mattered most.  And what you see here is architecture functioning as an optical device.  The only way to make sense of all those images is to build an architectural model, a very  basic one as you can see, and locate each one of the images within it and see the relationship  within them.  You can't really understand images through montage, through the kind of the classic principle  of sticking them together into a film.  But what you need to do is to navigate between them.  You need to look at them three dimensionally.  And architecture is the only way effectively to view images.  There's no other alternative.  I mean, here you would see in a second our attention to clouds led us to, in fact, be  able also to see a very disturbing element in the sky.  When you look at frame by frame, we start seeing the bombs before they were falling  on the ground.  And knowing exactly where they fell, we could actually intersect the plane of where they  were, measure that photographic plane, measure the bombs, and the lawyers wanted to know  which bombs they were, because that went to the International Criminal Court, et cetera.  So we could put a grid behind them and actually measure the size of the bombs, and then go  through the catalog and chase the supply chain off them and actually find the exact bomb  that was used in theirs captured simply in a kind of 1.25 of a second.  But you don't see that.  If you just look at the film, you need to really look at the, and here we do some fluid  dynamics on the clouds in order to understand their transformation so we can sync the entire  day.  So all of that is online and in the book, and you can look at it.  I suggest that we move on to a more recent project on a kind of torture prison in Damascus  or close to Damascus called Zad Naya, where who commissioned you and what did you find  out and what was the research problem here?  So prison and prison experience is really one of the limit conditions of architecture.  It's really the moment where a building is not only the location of torture or violation,  but it's the instrument of the crime.  The building is just one of, like any other instrument of torture, perhaps the most important  one of that.  After the civil war began in Syria, more and more reports about a horrific secret in the  sense that no international observers, no human right group, no journalists were ever  allowed to visit that prison existed.  The prison of Zad Naya, there were very few survivors, a lot of people, there were mass  executions there that are taking place.  But the Amnesty International managed to find five refugees in Turkey, Syrian refugees,  that survived the hell of Zad Naya.  And they wanted to, in fact, to give testimony.  And then a problem emerges.  And that's a problem that is often happening in human right context.  The closer you get to the traumatic event, the further away from a precise description  you're able to give.  There's all sort of lacuna, there's all sort of repetition that start happening when you  get closer to the pain.  However, they really wanted to undergo this process and after a lot of explanation of  what it would require and what it would involve, Amnesty commissioned us to do that.  We traveled to Turkey and we undertook two experiments.  One was architectural.  We asked them to effectively build with us in a very, very systematic, slow manner, the  rooms of the prison as they could remember them to be.  You can just play that.  Yeah, so we could just leave it in the background.  You can see the process.  And the other was sound.  And we were working with one of our members, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, who is a sound artist  and developed a technique of sound profiling and echo profiling by which he was playing  various tones to the refugees and they were kind of identifying the right sort of acoustic  frequency.  And the reason was that they were led into that prison blindfolded.  So many of them had not even seen anything in it.  Their experience was at the threshold of vision and at the threshold of sound because also  they were not allowed to speak or to shout when they were tortured.  So it was again a kind of an experiment into the limit condition of the sensorium.  And well, the result was quite astounding because it was not as if we were building an architectural  memory from people's recollection.  In fact, what we were doing was building the memory through architecture.  So different elements that they could model for us, the size of the floor tiles, the height  of windows.  So a very mundane thing, all of a sudden would spring up with a recollection that was previously  repressed and allowing that memory to rebuild together with the rebuilding of the model.  And that kind of shows, well, I mean, there's a big discussion obviously to be had about  the relationship between memory and architecture and trauma, et cetera, from the art of memory,  so the Renaissance or the classic art of memory onwards.  But here there was a kind of a digital version of it that kind of combines sound and architecture.  And here is a little example.  With this actually we should hear.  I'm going to go through it again.  This is all on our website and I think you should give that work the attention that it  deserves if you want to see it.  Our modeller, a Palestinian woman called Hania Jamal is asking the detainee simply to model  for her the hatch in the door.  And he was just saying that the hatch is bigger than his face.  And she asked him how come or how come he knows about it.  And then he remembers the most horrific.  Okay.  Okay.  I mean this is a very short snippet from a longer piece where you could see that the  modeling, this small architectural element is kind of an entry point into the most traumatic  memory that this detainee has remembered.  And you understand architecture's power in not only as material evidence but as a way  of communication, as a way of entering as a memory device, an entry point into recollection.  This is very important.  And I think that also the response to that was because that became rather prominent.  Investigation was widely reported.  And again the same kind of denial that we heard from the Fofas and Shots, from the CIA,  from the Israeli military, we now heard from Assad who was saying in a very similar way,  you know, just like the people supporting Assad, to some extent Assad himself, you know,  I showed you this video today, we decided not to show it, but you could have seen now  half as a lot that actually kind of responding to this thing.  But part of the accusation we received was that we are artists, that we are architects,  that this is not serious evidence, etc.  And let's move at this point from the denial of Assad and Syria to maybe obviously a denial  strategy in Germany.  And let's come back to the NSU trial.  I think we now got a pretty good impression what forensic architecture is doing amongst  other projects.  And I think we stopped when we were talking about the NSU trial and the NSU complex at  the moment when you presented your work at the documentar.  You proved, at least if we follow the opinion of many people, that Andreas Temme, the member  of the Verfassenkschutz, has to be a witness, had to be a witness of the murder of Haled  Jaskat.  You presented it at the documentar and now let's talk about what happened then.  What was the reaction to your piece?  No, first of all, just to say that the documentar was an extremely important forum for us.  When you are in the business of counter forensics, you don't have the courts.  And in fact, we can speak about it later.  Our invitation to the court was actually canceled, although we were initially asked to present  here in Munich.  You do not have the official channels of truth speaking.  And you need to find alternative forums.  Also when we take evidence against the CIA or the Israeli government, there is no court.  There's no court that easily can deal with that kind of evidence.  It's a much more chaotic field.  It's not really organized and bureaucratic system of justice.  We put that in the documentar, obviously together with the tribunal people and the invitation  of the documentar, but precisely because we thought that the German public need to see  it, that it's not a bureaucratic rendering of truth, but that evidence need to be made  public.  And the reason it was the documentar being as popular as it is seemed to us like the  right approach.  And in fact, it caught because the Hessen parliamentary inquiry started to sit on that case.  And Hessen is obviously where Kassel is.  And there are big questions to be answered, particularly about the fact that the Hessen  Ministry of the Interior and Sport in charge of the Fafasungschutz has put 120 years'  ban on the file.  So the Fafasungschutz itself has investigated it.  The Fafasungschutz itself knows who the contact of Andres Temer are.  And they have decided to put 120 years' ban.  120 years' ban would mean that by 2134, so hold the suspense, by that time we would  know what this guy was doing there.  Now if he was, if there's nothing about it, why should they put the ban till that date?  It's kind of a panic reaction when CIA secrets are about 50 years, nuclear secrets about  35 sometimes, five generations of Germans and also the family itself would not live  to know the truth.  And the father of Halitios Gert, Ismailios Gert, continuously say, I do not believe Andres  Temer.  I think he either knows about who the killers are or he's himself involved in it.  The fact is that those questions need to be put to rest, right?  So it's not simply showing the evidence, it's fighting for them.  In counter forensics you need to really, you need to know that you enter into an arena  when the truth is established by a conflict and you need to be ready to get some counter  punches, right?  As I said, you know, we had all along with the other examples that I had before.  So that was called into the parliamentary inquiry and Andres Temer was invited to come  to Vizpad and I think, is that the capital of?  Yes.  To actually be screened the document, so we passed them the file and they screened that  film and Andres Temer was there to look at it.  However, before it was screened, the CDU faction in the Hessian parliamentary inquiry  and remember that Hessian is, you know, the government is CDU, the Bouffier who was the  interior minister at the time and was involved in putting also later the ban is now the prime  minister or the leader of, what do you say?  Minister president.  Of Hessian, so the CDU was determined to sabotage and to stop each and every attempt to open  the file and to make the truth be known.  And because they cannot confront it on substantial level, what they've done is to produce a very  fierce attack on forensic architecture.  So they did not want it screened in the parliamentary inquiry.  They did not want Temer to be confronted with it and all of the sudden they've magicked,  which I don't know exactly how and from, a 50 page counter-counter forensic report.  A report countering line by line everything that we said.  Now the playing field was not leveled because they had, as the other parties in the parliamentary  inquiry suspected all along, a close contact, etc., with other information.  All of the sudden that material comes out.  That produce another timeline, another time, you remember the time codes in the internet,  the login, log out of the phone and the internet.  All of the sudden another document come.  This time it's not by the castle police, by the boss force.  This is the task force of the federal police in Germany that had slightly different time  codes and they're blaming us for getting the time wrong and various other things.  I'll speak about the others later.  By doing that, A, by producing that account, which I do not know who in the CDU would produce  would know anything about forensics to do that, it could be, it was suggested that perhaps  it was passed on to them.  It was an unsigned document.  In forensics, unsigned documents are completely worthless.  You need to know who produced it.  They did not produce the name.  They said we are not producing the name.  Here is an unsigned document in which we show scientifically that forensic architecture  are just an artist group and that all are their experiment is wrong.  Who passed it on to them?  What does that reveal on their relation?  Second, they've produced this boss force report with different time codes.  It didn't work, although the linker patai kind of was taken aback, the espede pushed  it and said that is our evidence now and submitted it as a request.  Part of the film was screened.  Andrestem was confronted in it.  When he saw this bit where he is looking with this 3D model, his only complaint was I am  the main actor in this film.  How come I do not get royalties or they don't ask my permission for it?  The pressure is still on and I think that effectively they have somehow revealed their  hand.  This nice guy is Bellino, one of the...  He is a business leader of the CDU faction in the Hessische Landtag.  Yes, and in fact, I believe you.  I try to pre-prepare.  Yes, so he is kind of like a big sort of nemesis in this story.  And I think it's worth kind of looking at the accusation that he raises.  So first of all, he says we are...  To submit an art piece, to submit a documentary art piece into the parliamentary inquiry is  almost like sacrilege, you almost kind of like produce something.  You contaminate the field.  Those fields should be held separate.  The field of cultural production, the field of cultural analysis if you like.  And the serious grown-up, right?  So the kids should play in the documenta and let the grown-up decide in the room.  Then there's several other...  Here is...  I don't know if you have it.  Oh, sorry.  Do you have the other?  Yeah.  So here is...  This is just the first page of their report.  You obviously don't need a translation that I've done for non-German speakers.  The Hessische CDU, maybe one should mention, produced a 40-page Gutachten, which is not  public.  Exactly, yeah.  This is what we suspect because it was unsigned.  We suspect somebody has passed it on to them.  We do not know until they do not reveal the name of the person that produced it, it's  valueless because we need also to check the credential of that person.  But in fact, if you look at the kind of complaints they have, that first of all, that it's a  tribunal, right?  The word tribunal means that we already marked the target and etc., etc.  It's a kind of misunderstanding of the power of civil society initiative to question the  very institution of states.  And then he says, we are not state certified.  Of course we are not.  We're questioning the state.  This was not invited to court.  Of course not.  It questioned the very legal process.  This is not official evidence but leaks.  Well, this is how investigations are done these days by leaks and of course the worst  accusation of all that we are architects and artists and also creative people, which seems  to me the most kind of debased, this kind of left for the last.  But in fact, we think that civil society needs to take over, need to act in a non-certified  way, need to take over the means of production in the sense of evidence production, need  to use the kind of intelligence of architects and also of artists and filmmakers.  When we are doing films or when we're looking at films, of course, we would work with filmmakers.  We will also work with scientists.  It is the interdisciplinarity.  It's the self-authorized nature of that project that we think make it important.  The fact is that the Tzedew has still defended Temer on very, very shaky ground and they  know that they do that.  This is why all that kind of thunderstorm of banal accusation are kind of flying our  way.  They are resting on nothing.  We can show clearly his scene.  He's hurt.  He might have smelled.  We know that now that he's sitting in his chair at the time of the killing because the  new Bosphorus Report timing exclude even the possibility he's left the shop.  To be in a position like that and to rely on micro percentages of possibilities and on  ad hominem attacks, on attack on civil society, ban the Tzedew party, on civil society, on  their own people, the people's tribunal.  Human activists, the family members that are involved with that.  This is really, I find in that language, a disrespectful and humiliating response to the  action and to the just demand of civil society and the family to know the truth before 2134  was it.  To rely on the fact that he might have not heard by some miracle of acoustics or etc.  It's just unreasonable.  In fact, I think that German society deserves to know that and more than anyone else, the  family.  Thank you very much.  Before we open up the discussion, I'm sure there are many questions here.  I wanted to finish by saying that you reacted to the Tzede-Ugutachten with an open letter  that I can really highly recommend to read.  It's on your website, forensic architecture website.  There's one sentence I would like to read before we start with the discussion.  Quote, it should be concerning to every citizen of Hessen that such a report which cites no  expert witness and no methodology should be used to disrupt the efforts of independent  investigators to read the truth of a nationally significant matter.  We believe that the Joss Gottfemmeli, the citizens of Hessen and Germany, as well as  European civil society in general, deserve more from their elected representatives.  At this point, I would like to open up the discussion.  I'm not sure if we have a microphone for the questions.  Yes, we have.  Do we have any questions or comments?  Sorry, the light here.  Anna Maria Meister, please.  Please use the microphone.  Thanks.  Okay, thank you for your talk and the conversation, which I think everybody realizes is a very  important one.  I have two questions.  One is an epistemological one.  I think I went to the trial for a while in the summer and Temmys lies came up in several  different ways.  He lied about all sorts of things, not just his witnessing, but one way the judge at one  point or I think one of the judges at one point dismissed another motion by the Liebenklager,  so the families of the victims, lawyers, was to say that in a German criminal trial, the  assumption of, by asking a witness, is the assumption of trust.  You ask a witness what they tell you.  You later judge in your own considerations, but you assume they speak the truth.  If they say they cannot remember, you assume that they cannot remember.  The problem with proving that somebody didn't see something or that somebody should have  seen something is that subjective personal experience cannot be proven.  There's several studies on how either distracted or focused or something you could be and not  see things that anybody else in the same situation would have seen or that you wouldn't  have heard something that anybody else would have heard.  It's an epistemological question and I think this is the only work that I know of you anyway  where the outcome of the expertise is proving someone's subjective experience rather than  using subjective experience to prove something else.  I wonder if that, I mean we talk about probability, but the question is an epistemological one,  what do you do with the subject, if we have to assume that subjective experience is subjective,  what would you say to the judge when he says, well, I cannot prove, you cannot prove to  me that the witness has seen something because you can prove that it was there or that it  happened, but you cannot prove that he perceived it or experienced it.  It's an important question and obviously this is something that we encounter very often  when, as I said, when we speak to traumatic witnesses.  Another one of the interviews that we just decided to take out is discussing memory errors  of witnesses and how important it is to be tuned to the errors of traumatized witnesses.  Sometimes precisely in the wrong description of the space, and there was a testimony of  one of those refugees, survivors of Sa'dnaya, who we know was tortured in, because by that  time we figured out the building more or less, we knew that the place where he was tortured  was a corridor and was a straight corridor, but he told us it was a spherical, circular  space and rather than dismiss this testimony, we thought that in the error of recollection  exists more important to even information in the correct Hortesian description because  it includes also a subjective traumatized experience.  So there's a lot of literature on memory failures, memory distortions of traumatized  victims.  It would be a stretch to call Temer at that moment a traumatized witness to an act of  violation.  However, you're right.  When the first shot happened, somebody could have dropped a cup of coffee.  When the second shot happened, somebody could have just, you know, dropped a chair and when  he was going to that place, he might have gotten fly in his eye.  Who knows, right?  For all those things to have happened in a sequence, you're entering a zone of diminished  probability.  You cannot, every finding in physical science, natural science has a margin of probability.  Right?  Sometimes the margin of probability, the scientists would say, well, this phenomenon I've identified  in the margin of probability is 10%.  Sometimes they would say this is 0.1%.  It doesn't exist, the finding without a margin of probability.  The thing is, how do you calibrate the margin of probability to the question that is being  asked now?  If this was a criminal trial of Temer, and Temer would have been convicted of murder,  according to that, you could rely as a plausible defense on such small crumbs of probability.  If you agree with me, we're speaking about very, very promiles, right?  Of probability that all those things happen in a sequence precisely when he was there  to have seen that.  That depends on the judge's own interpretation of what is reasonable and unreasonable.  There's also, remember, unreasonable, there's reasonable doubt, right?  There's also doubt that is unreasonable because the legal domain understand that there is no  100% probability on anything.  There's a misunderstanding of the function and nature of evidence here.  This is not a criminal trial of Temer, and he would not be convicted of murder if we  show that he heard seen and perhaps smelled.  What we need to show is that there is a very serious probability that he hasn't, and that  there is great public interest in opening the file.  The public interest is the interest of the family, of their support, of the community,  and of German civil society, to know who he was speaking to, what he was doing, not only,  as you said, in that show, et cetera.  Of course, we entered into that kind of like, entered with the molecular level of that case  precisely because we found, or we thought, that there is a possibility, this is the most  vulnerable, that's the place where the state is most vulnerable.  We entered full force into it.  Of course, we are civil society organization with limited means.  We need to choose our battles, and we chose it here.  One is a question of probability.  The other is a question of perception.  I think that, again, you need to calibrate the doubt to the question, and what is at  stake within that.  Law, the truth, history need to assume the possibility that we share a common world, that  we share at least a basic perception of the world in which we are together.  Without that, without the materiality of the world that we can share, that is a world,  this is a chair, this is a chair that is falling, this is a body, there's a hole in  the head of that body.  There's no politics, politics is not possible.  We need to agree, we need to know how the social contract is calibrated to the way that  we can describe the world around us.  If we are to open all those levels of doubt, we'll become atomized individuals in completely  individualistic self-perception, without the possibility of common action and common perception.  Of course, history is a common project.  History is what we can all agree is the truth around a particular event, and it will change  when more evidence will become available.  That's the beauty of it.  Also in that case, our conclusion has changed.  The more information came into the public domain, and in fact, more information came  into the public domain precisely because of the, or partly because of the provocation  that we have undertaken and the response, the counter slap, if you get slapped from somebody,  they already reveal a lot.  That was our experience in all our cases.  Thank you very much.  Do we have more comments or questions?  Yes, please.  Utter Lecourne, please.  Please use the microphone.  Yeah.  You have been collaborating or working with GOs or national organizations.  Could you imagine a situation where you would be working for or with a government?  Oh, never.  No.  I mean, this is absolutely, we have refused various attempts by governments.  Sometimes they are like amazing commissions that I would love to.  We were offered by the Polish government to examine the crash of the government plane  in Russia and to have the opportunity to examine the black box.  I mean, for any person in our field, that would have been an amazing thing to do technically  and intellectually.  However, the Polish government, the way it is, it's a tack on civil society, it's xenophobia,  it's a regressive attitude, it's anti-Semitism is such that we would never work with them.  But in principle, not with any other government, not also with so-called good government.  We are civil society group.  Our aim is to develop civil society group precisely to keep government a check.  Do we have more questions or comments?  Yes, please.  Could you please use the microphone?  You have a strong voice, yes?  Okay, you don't work with the governments, but did you have a problem?  Did you become problems with governments which you work in these cases, for example, Syria,  Israel, US, Mexico?  Well, you know, we just came back from Mexico and the level of precautions we had to take  after working on the Ayotzinapa case, so the 43 disappeared students in Ayotzinapa was such  that affected really our ability to actually travel back to the place where we wanted to  present it to Ayotzinapa, to the school, to Iguala, to the place where it happened, simply  because the civil society organization we worked with felt that they threatened to such  a degree that we cannot do that.  When we presented the Rafa report that I showed on the cloud in Jerusalem, in East Jerusalem,  we received threats that somebody is going to come with a gun and shoot us.  We had to move from one presentation place to another.  We had to even take a Palestinian security company, which I don't know, it's almost a  contradictory term, what's a Palestinian security company if it's in Israel?  It's just a group of teenagers with black t-shirts.  In every story there's another kind of possibility, other of interruption, of arriving at the  evidence or actual intimidation, threats at the airport, traveling.  Okay, thank you very much.  I don't see any hands in the air right now.  So as a just we close here, my last question to you, I would be, Daniel Libeskin once described  the discipline of architecture as the only optimistic art form.  You can't sell a house to a future client by saying everything is going to be worse.  So there's a deep optimism in our discipline.  Obviously you need to be an optimist to be productive.  You are extremely productive.  Where do you take your optimism from?  It's probably the only thing I can agree about, it was Daniel Libeskin.  I just thought I could never agree with anything, but this thing I would sign on to.  I think that architecture allows us, not only architecture, I think that our role is, the  possibility that we have as civil society, people in the kind of cultural sphere, in  the creative fields in art, architecture, critical studies, you name it, our kind of  amorphous interdisciplinary field, is not only there to deconstruct, to ask questions,  to criticize, but actually to produce, we are able to produce bodies of knowledge, we  are able to produce new insights into things.  And I think it's kind of a possibility of slightly, not, I don't think all artists  need to do that, but of opening up a possibility, an agency of what we can do and how we can  make use of our criticality, of our analytic faculty, of our indexiality, of our ability  to operate this and that software, and to edit films, etc., and to make exhibitions  in a way that challenges the state in a rather poignant way, not only by problematizing what  they say, but actually by proving them wrong.  Thank you very much, I.L., for your work in general and your optimism in particular.  Thank you very much.  One second.  One second.
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