Materia: Investigación artística para la creación documental. Tema: Arqueologías de la imaginación. Profesor: Pablo MZ
Cómo vemos (1986)
Podemos percibir distintas estrategias de montaje que van del empalme (Eisenstein, Vertov) al desempalme (Peleshian), de la cercanía a la distancia
“To investigate is to track movements, to disentangle the making of a situation, to work our the genesis of an incident” (107)
“If aesthetics is about sensing and making sense, its pairing with investigation is a demand for a reworking and heightening of the aesthetic sensorium” (108)
“The investigative mode is based upon a variant conception of truth and promotes a slightly different process of discovery to the stratigraphic one” (109)
“The investigative mode does not simply distrust a photograph, bur dives into the way it is encoded, compressed, formated, seeking to augment what can be seen in it” (109)
“Investigative tools may also sometimes be the means by which power both operates and can be confronted” (110)
“carching truth formation in motion”
“Investigation works with techniques that arre able to move across technologies, languages, ideas, economies, architectures, substances, representations and so on” (111)
“An investigation, like any perspectival operation, is constructive in that it shapes its relation to what i looks at, or what it understands by looking. It is constitutive because in making an investigation, in proposing new conditions of knowing, seeing and doing, it engenders the possibility of , or these things and thus puts in play the capacity to experiment with reality formation more broadly” (111)
Wizman, Eyal. Prólogo del libro: Álvarez Romero, Ekaterina y Plasencia, Clara (2017). Forensic Architecture: Hacia una estética investigativa. México-Argentina: MUAC-MACBA.
“Al usar la palabra forense, tratamos de revertir la mirada forense e investigar los mismos organismos estatales –como la policía o el ejército– que suelen monopolizarla. Como tal, nuestra labora investigativa tiende a salirse de los límites y los requisitos de procedimiento de los foros judiciales en los que la presentamos. Nuestro propósito es situar los sucesos en su contexto histórico e ir sacando de los detalles microfísicos los hilos más largos –procesos políticos, acontecimientos y relaciones sociales, conjunciones de actores y de prácticas, estructuras y tecnologías– para conectarlos de nuevo con el mundo que los ha hecho posibles” (p. 7).
“La negación no es meramente un discurso retórico –la difusión de contradiscursos o de información falsa, sembrar la duda con respecto a la posibilidad misma de los hechos–, sino también lo físico.” (p. 7).
“Pero la ‘arquitectura’, para nosotros, es, parafraseando a Carlo Ginzburg, ‘no una fortaleza, sino un puerto o un aeropuerto, un lugar desde el que embarcarnos a otras destinaciones’. Como arquitectos, investigadores y activistas, vemos los edificios como sensores políticos, la política como un proceso de materialización y mediatización” (p. 8).
“Nuestra labor tiene también una función que está relacionada con los medios de comunicación. Las ciudades no solo son edificios, son espacios sociales, el hogar de civiles atrapados en el conflicto. Cada vez más, las ciudades se han convertido también en entornos de gran densidad mediática (…)” (p. 8).
“El encuentro entre la arquitectura y la ciencia forense supone un reto para ambas disciplinas. Mientras que la arquitectura añade un método de investigación esencial al presente político, la ciencia forense exige que el arquitecto dispense la máxima atención a la materialidad del entorno edificado y a cómo este aparece representado en los medios. Asimismo, nos desafía a realizar públicamente análisis arquitectónicos en los foros políticamente más hostiles. En este sentido, allí donde la arquitectura dirige la atención de la ciencia forense a los edificios y ciudades, la ciencia forense convierte a la arquitectura en una práctica investigativa, en un modo de indagación probatorio del presente mediante su materialización espacial” (p. 9).
“Que ‘produzcamos’ nuestros hechos no significa que nos los inventemos. De hecho, esta es la paradoja inherente a la práctica de reconstruir los actos de violencia y destrucción. Una parte de nuestra labor es necesaria para establecer y representar incluso el hecho más básico; al mismo tiempo, sin embargo, para juntar y cruzar entre sí un montón de fragmentos de pruebas diferentes es absolutamente imprescindible que estos hechos se muestren de una manera clara, evidente y fácil de comprender. Los edificios y las imágenes no hablan por sí solos. Para ser efectivas, todas las pruebas necesitan que alguien las presente, las defienda y las movilice. La convicción –tanto en el sentido habitual de creencia arraigada como en el etimológico de un veredicto judicial– no está nunca garantizada, ni siquiera cuando las pruebas, como un edificio, parecen sólidas” (p. 14).
Weizman, Eyal (2016). On Forensic Architecture: A Conversation with Eyal Weizman. En OCTOBER 156, Spring 2016, pp. 116-140, USA: MIT.
“It’s important to make critiques simultaneously personal and systemic, which means to add an investigative-journalistic dimension to theoretical work” (Weizman, 2016, p. 119).
“Producing evidence depends on aesthetics, presentation, and representation” (Weizman, 2016, p. 120).
“(…) seeing is a kind of construction that is also conceptual and culturally conditioned, hence the indispensability of artistic sensibility (…) it is only through aesthetics that we can both perceive and present. Our understanding of aesthetics is both archaic and contemporary; it refers to material perception, not only to human perception. Material aesthetics doesn’t refer to the human sensorium but to the capacity of all material things to sense, to register their proximity to other things and to their environment” (Weizman, 2016, p. 122).
“I think it’s essential for any discussion of political aesthetics to start with materiality, so that we don’t get lost in the solipsistic world of the subject or in endless meditations on the spectator (…) Material aesthetics is the way things relate to one another, because material change depends on all sorts of things around them that these things also record (…) The principle of matter as a strange sensor is the basis of forensic science. Just as a photographic negative records the proximity of objects, other material surfaces” (Weizman, 2016, p. 122).
“To understand the relation, one has to look at common elements and triangulate” (Weizman, 2016, p. 126).
“(…) architecture as a ‘political plastic’ — the product of force-form relations — seeing buildings as the medium through which political and physical forces are slowed into form (…) Forensics poses a fundamental challenge to architecture in demanding attention to its outer limits” (Weizman, 2016, p. 128).
“The key is to synthetize without losing information. Contradictions, mistakes, and lacunae record something important — often the very effect of violence or the presence of trauma and thus the ultimate truth of the event” (Weizman, 2016, p. 129).
“The architecture in forensic architecture could also be understood as the making of forums. (…) For evidence to be heard forums need to be constructed” (Weizman, 2016, p. 132).
“We learned that it’s not enough to address an academic context or a general ‘public domain’, and that to become political we need to think about available civil tools and institutions that can exercise political leverage. This is always a tactical part of a long term struggle. In this context we’re not arguing with or critiquing the occupation. We’re trying to find ways to confront it” (Weizman, 2016, p. 140).
Huffschmid, Anne (2020). The Human Remains. Forensic Landscapes and Counter-Forensic Agencies in Violent Presents – The Mexican Case. Alemania: Deutsche Stiftung Friedensforschung.
“Forensic action of all kinds aims, very roughly speaking at the production and construction of evidence, be it for strictly legal setting, to be presented before a judge or ina trial, or in broader context: it is about evidencing the fact and events that have not been evident (tangible, seeable, sayable) before (…) it is about materializaing and revealing delibererately invisibilized double crime against people’s basic human rights (to life, for instance) and also against evidence itself” (Huffschmid, 2020, p. 12).
Landscape as a strategic field
“Even if we do not intervene as active searchers of forensic anthropologists, we become part of it, and the landscapes becomes part of our imaginary world” (Huffschmid, 2020, p. 14).
“The forensic field is framed by powerful visual cultures, where images actually perform and have to be considered active agents”(Huffschmid, 2020, p. 22).
“photographic images turn into a contact zone with unimaginable realities” (Huffschmid, 2020, p. 23).
Images “actively participate in the creation of its meaning, independent from the possibly good intentions of artists or journalists that circulate these images” (Huffschmid, 2020, p. 24).
“Forensic reconstruction is, or should be, about signifying –assigning meaning and sense to apparently senseless violence but also to seemingly mere scientific or technical procedures. Accordingly, forensic sciences and practices hold narrative potential, I argue, by seeking to reconnect material and shattered traces of bodies, objects and landscapes in order to reconstruct significant stories of human beings, of politics, of violation and memory. These are stories that do not aspire to any totality but rather assume their fragility and highly fragmentary nature – there is so much that might never be known, so many bodies that will remain nameless, so many perpetrators that will never be sanctioned. And yet, forensic narratives may contribute to the expansion of the field of the knowable and, therefore, the imaginable” (Huffschmid, 2020, p. 36).
“One of the most interesting lessons of the narrative process was learning that understanding, might be triggered by elements that are not necessarily textual” (Huffschmid, 2020, p. 40).
“(…) we need research strategies and narratives that are able to subvert this excessive opacity or opaque excess by disconnecting and also reconnecting procedures: one th one hand, dismantling established (visual) discourses on violence, and on the other, associating the dissociated. We may call this, tentatively, work on forensic imagination” (Huffschmid, 2020, p. 40).
Forensic Landscapes: notas de arte 1, 2, 3, 4
