Citizens of Evidence: Forensic Architecture: Horizontal Verification and the Socialised Production of Evidence

At the heart of Forensic Architecture’s ‘counter-forensic’ practice is an understanding of the production of evidence as a collaborative enterprise by civil society, in which situated knowledge speaks in coalition with technical, legal, and journalistic expertise. Through the lens of a selection of Forensic Architecture’s recent cases, Robert Trafford discusses how this approach works in practice, its promise, and some of its problems. What are the challenges to traditional forms of truth-production that this ‘socialisation’ overcomes? What are the avenues through which civil society can expose and prosecute violence, when the state is responsible for that violence? How must this kind of truth be reconstituted when it interacts with legal and political forums?