Forensic Architecture's collaboration with the Colombian Truth Commission represents one of the most challenging and extensive investigations in FA's history. The cases trace various historical processes of violence into the present. They include land dispossession in the banana growing region of Urabá, enforced disappearance in the case of the siege on the Palace of Justice (1985), and the ongoing violence against indigenous peoples in the Amazon. Our approach to each investigation represents new ways to deal with historical processes of violence and their visual representation. The crime of enforced disappearance involves both violence against people and the long-term suppression of the evidence that would establish what happened to them. Creating a detailed timeline of events following the siege on the Palace of Justice, we show how different types of evidence—videographic, testimonial, documentary— were suppressed for the last 36 years, demonstrating how the perpetrators concealed the crime of enforced disappearance. In Urabá, we show how dispossession occurred in the shadow of armed repression, massacres, and terror spread by private paramilitary forces, serving local and international banana producers under the protection of the Colombian military. It exposes how these producers and their paramilitary forces benefited from the dispossession of campesino farmers. This session will go over the methodologies and key concepts of each case, in particular, we will focus on the construction of the seven films that were a result of this collaboration and view examples. 

Hannah Meszaros Martin is an artist, filmmaker and writer. She holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a Research Fellow at Forensic Architecture (FA), which she has been a member of since 2012. She was the Researcher in Charge of the collaboration with the Truth Commission. With FA, she has exhibited at the House of World Cultures (Berlin), MACBA (Barcelona) MUAC (Mexico City), and mostly recently at the Banco de la Republica (MAMU) in Bogotá. She contributed to the book FORENSIS (Sternberg, 2014). She has exhibited solo work in Medellín, London, documenta(13), and Manifesta13 (Marseille). She has published with the Journal of Political Ecology, Journal of Visual Cultures, Open Democracy, Third Text and Different Skies, a publication that she co-founded in 2012.

The talk takes place online. To receive the zoom link please write an email to projekt@lothringer13.com, subjekt: forensic architecture

I Did Not See It Coming is supported by Akademie der Bildenden Künste München.