Forensic Architecture

Feature image description: Cloud Studies is playing on the wide screen of an Art Deco movie theatre, The Capitol. The film frame captured in the moment of documentation shows fourteen cylindrical objects, in pastel jewel tones, scattered across the ground, close to a mesh fence. The interior of the theatre is ornate, covered with crystalline plaster elements. The photograph has been taken from the upper tier of seats, so that we are looking downwards towards the screen, and a technician in a white t-shirt, who is on the left balcony, head bent, intently observing a computer screen. [Other image descriptions embedded in alt text.]

In the aftermath of this calamity there is a danger that rather than offering sanctuary to all living species, sadly the world will enter a new period of tension and brutality…Many states will seek to fortify their borders in the hope of protecting themselves from the outside. They will also seek to conceal the constitutive violence that they continue to habitually direct at the most vulnerable. Life behind screens and in gated communities will become the norm.

— Achille Mbembe

Forensic Architecture’s Cloud Studies (2021) is a sweeping investigation into toxic air, and the way in which the atmosphere – including the air we breathe – can be weaponised, transformed into acts of state violence rooted in longstanding structures of colonialism, capitalism and racism. In other words, power. Spanning a decade of research and a range of investigatory methodologies, including 3D modelling, fieldwork, geolocation, machine learning and remote sensing, Cloud Studies has been distilled into a narrative video work of 26 minutes and 9 seconds. That narrative is composed of a series of nine vignettes or chapters, each titled for a different chemical compound, and each introduced on screen by its chemical formula and common name: cement, white phosphorus, glyphosate, carbon dioxide, methane, tear gas, water, chlorine, and cement, again. 

The video begins with cement (CaO, or ‘quick lime’), as we hear an explosion while a cloud, seen from a distance, comes into view. The image is incredibly beautiful, as clouds are, and sets into motion a purposeful tension that runs throughout the video between aesthetics and evidence, art and politics. This is the tension we seek to harness by presenting the work at The Capitol, RMIT University, the opulent, historic art deco theatre in Naarm Melbourne’s Central Business District, designed by Marion Mahony Griffin and Walter Burley Griffin, and opened to the pubic in 1924. Throughout Open House Weekend July 2022, Cloud Studies will run on a loop in the main cinema, the crystalline ceiling meant to recall a glittering cave, providing a powerful counterpoint to the devastating narrative on screen. Archival films supplementing the screening will be viewable in the lobby.  

As the video begins, the narrator tells us that in 2008, Israel launched a bombing campaign against the Gaza Strip, and describes a man explaining that in that moment, he felt as if he were breathing in his home. ‘Bomb clouds are architecture in gaseous form,’ explains the narrator, whose voice is poised, female and aphoristic, ‘changing from columns to mushrooms, before dissipating into the atmosphere’. The video goes on to chart the impacts, often nearly impossible to trace, of different chemical clouds: ecocide in Indonesia, in the form of forest fires emitting carbon dioxide; methane released by fracking in Argentina, and the Mapuche activists’ protests against that activity; tear gas, used as a centrifugal force to disperse masses of protesters in Tahrir, Pearl and Taksim squares, as well as Black Lives Matter protests in the United States; chlorine bombs dropped by the Syrian government on its people, and so on. 

Cloud Studies consciously mimics Victorian attempts to taxonomise and classify – and paint – clouds, nebulous and shapeshifting as they may be. Samaneh Moafi, the lead researcher on the project and an Australian-trained architect, explains, ‘Images of clouds – carcinogenic plumes, chemical gases, or smoke from fires – are hard to interpret. From within, these clouds appear as a kind of fog, an atmospheric blur if you like, fast moving and morphing. How can we use such images and video documentation to search for accountability, perhaps in the service of what Achille Mbembe foregrounded as the universal right to breathe?’—­­TM

References

Achille Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe,” trans. Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry 47 (Winter 2021): 60

Samaneh Moafi, “The Cloud Atlas as a Project,” paper delivered at the symposium, “Global Photography: Temporalities and Spatial Logics,” University of New Mexico Art Museum, 3 October 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oaja9kbLDfQ&ab_channel=UNMArtMuseum, accessed 27 April 2022.