This event is organized and carried out by project C04 "Between Opening and Closing: Political Movements and Artistic Intervention" of the Collaborative Research Center Intervening Arts. It takes place at the Centre for Social Critique at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.

The effort to recognize, address and combat racist violence always raises questions of social aesthetics. Especially where violence cannot be reduced to the actions of individuals, such as in cases of state, institutional or structural racist violence, it tends to elude perception in dominant publics and thus calls for practices of visibilization. Accordingly, in the context of racist violence domestic and abroad the question arises as to how normalized racist patterns of perception in society shape the assessment of these events.

We want to discuss this by reference to two recent cases, namely the terror attack in Hanau in 2020, in which Fatih Saraçoğlu, Ferhat Unvar, Gökhan Gültekin, Hamza Kurtović, Kaloyan Velkov, Mercedes Kierpacz, Said Nesar Hashemi, Sedat Gürbüz and Vili Viorel Păun were murdered, and Germany’s continuous military support to and complicity with Israel’s  military campaign in Gaza, which has been widely recognized by numerous UN experts and human rights organizations as consistent with genocide.

Under what circumstances is racist violence (mis-)recognized and thus (not) taken seriously? Through which socially forged aesthetic practices are social spaces marked as places of danger and menace and the lives of the people inhabiting or frequenting them thus made ungrievable? How is the normalization of racist violence reflected in the actions of the police, investigative authorities, courts, and governments that are entrusted with the official investigation and legal-political assessment of acts of racist violence?

Questions like these are at the heart of the work of the London-based research agency Forensic Architecture (FA) and its Berlin-based sister organization Forensis. Combining scientific, artistic and political approaches and methods, FA/Forensis investigate cases of violence by state and corporate actors.

In the workshop, Dimitra Andritsou, one of the researchers in charge, will present three investigations: In the first block, two investigations will be presented that FA/Forensis conducted in the context of the racist terror attack in Hanau together with the victims’ families and survivors in the Initiative 19. February Hanau. In the second block, an ongoing investigation by FA/Forensis will be presented, which engages with historical and current German arms exports to the state of Israel. More specifically, the investigation examines how, despite the International Court of Justice’s ruling on the plausible risk of genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, Germany has continued to offer military support to Israel through the supply of arms. By correlating these investigations, we aim to examine the connections between racist violence perpetrated in Germany and how that extends and intersects with state and corporate violence as exerted on an international and global level.

Since the workshop will focus on the methodological and conceptual approaches and their further development and refinement in the work of FA/Forensis, we ask all participants to familiarize themselves with the investigations in advance via the following links:

Racist Terror Attack in Hanau: The Arena Bar (Video)

Racist Terror Attack in Hanau: The Police Operation (Video)

German Arms Exports to Israel (text summary of the investigation report)