November 8 and 9, 2023
University of Southern California and Zoom

Sergio Beltran (UNAM), Paula Marujo (University of São Paulo, Autonoma Research Agency), Hannah Mezsaros Martin (USC), Oscar Pedraza (USC), Eduardo Romero (USC), Jason De León (UCLA), Ifor Duncan (Goldsmiths)

The Ethnography Studio co-sponsored two events on forensic architecture in Latin America.

On November 8, 12-2:30pm, panelists Oscar Pedraza (USC), Sergio Beltran (UNAM), Paula Marujo (University of São Paulo, Autonoma Research Agency), Hannah Mezsaros Martin (USC), Oscar Pedraza (USC), and Eduardo Romero (USC), with commentator Jason De León (UCLA) discussed “Ghastly Materialities: Forensic Architecture in Latin America and the Aesthetics of Impunity.”

On November 9, 11am-4pm, the same panelists plus Ifor Duncan (Goldsmiths) reconvened for an extended workshop. This workshop was open to all. Panelists shared their works in progress around the expanded field of forensic architecture, practice-based research and new methodologies that bring ethnography, design, filmmaking, and data visualization together to articulate histories of violence. 

What are the conditions that turn something into evidence? What are the institutions, practices and discourses that define the threshold at which an image, a sound, a landscape, or a testimony becomes legitimate evidence of violence? In Latin America the destruction, hiding and obfuscation of evidence is part of the processes of state formation, rather than an anomaly in its development. Forests are burnt and taken down for illegal logging and cattle ranch in the amazon; political activists are disappeared by state forces and illegal armies from Mexico to Argentina; extractivist projects remove ecosystems and communities to leave way to roads, rails and machines aimed to secure the continuous extraction of nature as a resource; evidence of state violence vanishes from legal cases, leading to an overwhelming hemispheric impunity. In this context, it is important to ask: what methods, conceptual approaches and research possibilities can render visible the practices of disappearing, obscuring, destroying, and hiding that are pervasive in Latin America and that further the reproduction of state violence? This panel brings together scholars and practitioners from and working in Brazil, Peru, Mexico and Colombia, who experiment with the techniques and methods of architecture, art, film, law, earth sciences, design and social sciences to investigate cases of environmental and political violence, in countries where the violence against evidence is a crucial part of governmental institutions. Their work combines conceptual and methodological experimentation to create pieces that move from art exhibitions to court rooms, expanding the novel field of forensic architecture and visual investigations into the geographies and political realities of Latin America.