Propositions #7/4: Reenact
77sqm_9:26min, 2017, courtesy Forensic Architecture
With Stefanos Levidis (Forensic Architecture, London), Natascha Sadr Haghighian (People’s Tribunal “Unraveling the NSU Complex” and Initiative 6 April, Kassel), and Lisa Ito (Concerned Artists of the Philippines, Manila)
If politics is a performance—or at least performative—then the staging and enactment of political events can serve as a means to inscribe new histories within the public memory. Theatrical devices can be used to open up the past to scrutiny and speculation, the present to reflection and mobilization, and the future to apprehension and collective imagination.
Focusing on the evidentiary method of reenactment, Stefanos Levidis and Natascha Sadr Haghighian discuss 77sqm_9:26min, 2017, a counter-investigation into the testimony of Andres Temme in relation to the murder of Halit Yozgat in Kassel on 6 April, 2006. Lisa Ito introduces the Concerned Artists of the Philippines’s collective responses to rising fascism and participation in the country’s anti-dictatorship struggle.
Part of Propositions #7: Evidentiary Methods
Propositions #7: Evidentiary Methods—the public program in the context of the exhibition Forensic Justice and part of the BAK series Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–2020)—expands upon the notion of forensic justice in a series of lectures, screenings, and workshops on methodologies for articulating claims within the multidimensional space of aesthetics, law, architecture, politics, and ecology. The series deepens the understanding of works by, or made in collaboration with, Forensic Architecture, including investigations that are not presented in the exhibition. Focusing on techniques and innovative evidentiary methods at the intersection of law, art, politics, and the changing media landscape employed in the forensic practice, the gatherings create a space for dialogue and exchange between concrete cases examined by Forensic Architecture and other ongoing political struggles in the Netherlands and beyond. The series is conceived in collaboration with Nick Axel (architectural theorist, Amsterdam).
