Biography
Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, investigating human rights violations including violence committed by states, police forces, militaries, and corporations. FA works in partnership with institutions across civil society, from grassroots activists, to legal teams, to international NGOs and media organizations, to carry out investigations with and on behalf of communities and individuals affected by conflict, police brutality, border regimes and environmental violence.
Approach and works on display
Follow the Oil
In Louisiana, along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, lies a heavily industrialized “Petrochemical Corridor” once known as “Plantation Country”. After the abolition of slavery in 1865, more than five hundred sugarcane plantations dotted the riverbanks; today, more than two hundred of those sites are occupied by some of the United States’ most polluting petrochemical facilities. Each of these plantations had at least one burial ground for the enslaved populations, but as these were not recorded on historical maps, the traces of these cemeteries have been erased. In 2015, two cemeteries were uncovered during a survey for a proposed expansion of a refinery owned by Shell Oil Company. Four years later, four more cemeteries were located during the early stages of the construction of a new facility by the company Formosa Plastics. How might we recover the memory of the hundreds, if not thousands, of missing cemeteries at risk of desecration? Together with fenceline community activist group RISE St. James, Forensic Architecture has developed a method to help locate these cemeteries in support of longstanding local efforts to protect ancestral sites and demands for a moratorium on the further expansion of the Petrochemical Corridor.
Project Coordinators: Imani Jacqueline Brown and Samaneh Moafi
Research: Dimitra Andritsou, Olukoye Akinkugbe, Omar Ferwati, Ariel Caine
Research Assistance: Kishan San, Nicholas Masterton, Nour Abuzaid, Sanjana Varghese, Ayana Enomoto-Hurst, Ana Lopez Sanchez-Vegazo, Caterina Selva, Jacob Bertilsson
Video Editing and Production: Sam Blair
Research Support: Robert Trafford
Project Support: Elizabeth Breiner, Sarah Nankivell
Project Supervision: Eyal Weizman