Francesco Sebregondi from Goldsmiths, University of London will give a public lecture at BSIS on Wednesday 4 February 2015, 14.00 – 16.00 entitled Forensic Architecture: Urban Conflicts, New Media, and the Political Representation of Violence.
Francesco Sebregondi is an architect, and a Research Fellow and Project Coordinator on the Forensic Architecture project, as well on the project that extends it, titled MAPP (2014-15). Since 2013, he teaches in the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, on the topic of “architecture and activism”. His research addresses the representation of spatially diffuse processes, the role of architecture as media, and the margins of contemporary cities. In 2013 he produced a series of maps and visualisations of the international judicial network – in collaboration with the Project on International Courts and Tribunals – which were published in the Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication (OUP, 2014). In 2012, he published the pamphlet “The Event of Void: Architecture and politics in the evacuated Heygate estate” (self-published).
The lecture, Forensic Architecture: Urban Conflicts, New Media, and the Political Representation of Violence, will present a selection of investigations from the collective research project Forensic Architecture. Those will be used as a lens to examine some of the new challenges to the political representation of violence – understood as the process of making violence both visible and available for action. Working with human rights organisations, Forensic Architecture conducts spatial and media analysis to investigate alleged violations of human rights and international law in places such as Pakistan, Ex-Yugoslavia, the Mediterranean, or Gaza. The lecture will start by unpacking the term “forensic” and its original relation to the “forum”, with a view to describe the forensic methodology at work in the research presented. It will then focus on two interrelated phenomena: not only are contemporary conflicts increasingly urban in character, but they are also being imaged in a variety of new ways – from satellite imagery to smartphone footage circulating on social media. How are these new regimes of image production and circulation, combined with the specifically urban setting of today’s wars, opening up new ways of establishing (counter-)narratives of violence?
Registration:
This event is free to attend.
Please register by sending an email to kentpubliclecture@gmail.com, stating your name and affiliation.
Venue
Wilson Room (3rd floor)
Brussels School of International Studies
University of Kent
Pleinlaan / Boulevard de la Plaine 5
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