Investigative Aesthetics

The exhibition at MACBA challenges us to consider how contemporary artistic practices and digital technologies can be geared up to engage the reality of post-truth. It shows the work of Forensic Architecture (FA), a research group formed by artists, architects, lawyers, activists and theorists. FA brings together archives of evidence on contemporary conflicts, creating new analysis methodologies as a form of political intervention in the field of human rights. Architecture, understood as a “political visual form” using buildings as sensors that accumulate information in their material deformation, is being asked here to include forensic practices.

  What is the role of “aesthetics”? This “forensic aesthetics” includes detailed attention to the image, the context, the detail... Those in FA who come from an art background contribute to a type of sensitivity and attention that helps to decode the images. They are specialists in visual forms and facts, and have the capacity to understand and shape visual signs.

The idea of truth that they pursue is not positivist, but rather a truth that is constructed pragmatically with all the problems of representation. The production of evidence depends on aesthetics, presentation and representation. “FA’s purpose is to use aesthetics as a way of intensifying the research process by opening the senses and increasing our sensitivity to space, matter, stories and images.”

until 15 October 2017
Forensic Architecture. Towards an Investigative Aesthetics
curated by Rosario Güiraldes
MACBA
Plaça dels Àngels 1, Barcelona