Drone Strikes

Terzo progetto, Drone Strikes. The Miranshah Case di Forensic Architecture.

Comunicato stampa

Although armed drones have been used in Afghanistan from the start of the US campaign in October 2001, the first known targeted assassination by the US outside a theatre of war took place in Yemen on November 3rd, 2002. Since June 2004 the main focus of the drone campaign has been in the frontier regions of Pakistan. The areas most imperiled by drone warfare are generally outside of the effective control of states.

Waziristan, part of a region of Pakistan known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), is also effectively under a media blackout due to a siege that forbids the entry and exit of nonresidents including journalists, and the taking of images or bringing out of recording devices. Consequently, few images of the damage caused by drones and even fewer eyewitness accounts and survivors’ testimonies are available outside of these regions.

Forensic Architecture undertook five detailed case study analyses of drone strikes. These have been created from the perspectives of survivors and on-site witnesses. The aim was to describe the effects of these strikes on the ground, on architecture, and on the people within them. In each case the research team cross- referenced the different types of data available, including satellite imagery, local and international media reports, witness statements, and on-the-ground images when and if available. Through these analyses Forensic Architecture was able to demonstrate that, despite all inhibiting circumstances, investigating specific drone strikes is in fact possible.

In the case study presented at White Hole, Forensic Architecture analysed a rare video testimony smuggled out of North Waziristan, in order to reconstruct the space of the drone strike and interrogate the event. The footage shows the ruins of a market in Miranshah hit by a strike on March 30th, 2012. By reconstructing the scene in a 3D digital model, cross-referencing data with satellite imagery, and animating the shadows of that structure, Forensic Architecture was able to establish the precise location of the strike, as well as the time the footage was shot.

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White Hole is a project space devoted to the production and dissemination of critical investigations into the relationship between technology, authority, the landscape and everyday life. It operates as a platform through which an international network of contributors and researchers can investigate, document and debate the forces—visible and invisible—that shape the contemporary landscape.

Inspired by the astrophysical concept of the white hole, a hypothetical region of spacetime which is inaccessible from the outside, the gallery itself cannot be entered although matter and light can escape from it. Its primary function is to project critical debate—increasingly confined to the online realm—into the public domain.

White Hole is a project by Lorenza Baroncelli, Marco Ferrari, Joseph Grima, Antonio Ottomanelli, Elisa Pasqual, in collaboration with Simone C. Niquille and Fitzgerald G. Saenger. It will exist for 12 months, until January 31st, 2016.