Simone Rowat: Forensic Aesthetics

Gallery VI INVITES YOU to a lecture by Simone Rowat from Forensic Architecture.


In recent years, Forensic Architecture (FA), a multidisciplinary research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London, has conducted a number of international investigations related to state crimes and human rights violations, including incidents in war zones, cases of politically and racially motivated violence, and extrajudicial killings.


Nowadays, conflicts are increasingly taking place in urban and densely populated environments, and the material traces left behind are more visible than ever in images, videos, and data generated around major events. FA is based on the use of architecture as an "analytical tool"; its research engages these complex media environments to carry out visual and spatial analyses, aimed at presentation at cultural forums and for judicial teams addressing human rights violations and war crimes, as well as for other investigative commissions and civil tribunals.


As a civic practice, FA attempts to overturn the predominantly state-controlled forensic perspective and instead highlight state misconduct. It operates in the realm of counter-forensics as its practice seeks to function in an environment of aesthetic and informational asymmetry – however, compared to the state itself – for instance, with limited access to controlled evidentiary sources and regulated institutional judicial forums.


Simone Rowat will focus her lecture on this notion of aesthetic asymmetry and will discuss the role of video analysis and filmmaking in FA's analytical and presentation research through several case studies. These include the re-appropriation of cinematographic techniques in investigating the presence of a covert agent at the scene of a racially motivated murder in Kassel, Germany, and strategies employed in situations where there is a lack of visual materials, as was the case in the investigation of illegal torture and detention in Cameroon in 2017, and in 2016 during the investigation of torture practices at Saydnaya Prison in Syria.


Simone Rowat has been working as a filmmaker and research associate at Forensic Architecture since 2016. She holds a master's degree in Photography and Moving Image from the Royal College of Art and a bachelor's degree from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Her film work addresses themes such as traumatic memory, simulation, and neuroplasticity.


The lecture is part of the accompanying program for the exhibition Forensic Architecture: The Architecture of Conflict.


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