welcome to hardtalk. i'm mishal husain. my guest today, here in london, is an israeli—born architect who wants to change his chosen profession. he works in what he calls forensic architecture, where details of buildings and physical spaces — and their destruction — are used to highlight abuses and persecution. is he right to see architecture as political — a way in which human beings can oppress as well as create? eyal weizman, welcome to hardtalk. your organisation is called forensic architecture. let's begin with you telling us what the essence of it is. what is it about?

forensic architecture is an organisation that provides architectural evidence in international forums, in tribunals and international courts. we present evidence in... ..in the media and also in exhibitions. in fact, we are... we have emerged through an understanding that so much of contemporary conflict happened in cities. and when conflict happen in cities, buildings and built environment become evidence for the crimes that are committed by the belligerent, by the militaries in them. so you could read the building in an analogous way to reading a dead body. you read the wound, you read a trace, and you start to reconstruct what has happened in this place from traces left in a built environment. it's an unusual way to look at architecture. yes, i studied architecture

here and um... in london, at the architectural association, and realised that the skill set of architects, what we know, what we learn, the kind of abilities that we have to look at a built environment, to model it, to simulate phenomena within it, are so useful to reconstruct incidents that happened... ..that happened in, um... ..in conflict zones and in other places, and that, in fact, one way to make sure that our skill is used politically — and when i say that, i mean for the sake ofjustice — is to employ our skills not only in order to design new environments, but to use the very same tools, the very same software that an architect would use — would employ in order to design a building, a living room,

a cafe, a restaurant, a high—rise tower — in order to analyse, in order to understand the world around us. and that provides a really unique set of information. but i wonder if you're also saying that, to some extent, all architecture is political, that there are choices — some we make, some that are imposed on us, on our use of space — where we are allowed to be, the way we build the walls around us. yeah, because human behaviour — and i'm speaking in general, no? our movement through space, the way in which space is allocated, the way it is divided, how much access you have to a place, what is the size of the space under your control, and what is the space you're excluded from — are actions that happen in... ..in...in space. and architects are those people that design space. and when you design and partition space, you exclude and include people, and you are able

to exercise a social and political agenda. therefore, to be able to understand it, to be able to analyse it, to be able to actually provide evidence based on architectural facts, allow a different way of understanding conflict. did some of where you are stem from the place in which you were born? you were born in israel. i think you started your architectural practice in a pretty conventionalwa . ~ then you did a phd on settlements in the occupied territories? is that — was that the starting point for where you are now? i guess there are multiple starting points but, indeed, when i was an architectural student, i went and volunteered at the palestinian ministry of planning because i realised, having grown in palestine, in israel, we have been subjected to a form of spatial control that is kind of unparalleled. if you are travelling, anyone that would travel through palestine these days, in the occupied territories, withinjerusalem,

in the galilee, in the negev, through the cities, would realise that the way that israel has designed spaces is continuous with its policy of displacing palestinians and containing the movement, of colonising their spaces, of building settlements, military bases, roads and all sorts of infrastructure in an unjust way. when you grow up in an environment like that, you understand and you start seeing architecture differently. you founded forensic architecture in 2011, i think, and your work has been — well, it's looked very far back in time since, including to colonial times in namibia — what is now namibia — but also in different parts of the world. police killings in europe, a theatre bombed by russia in ukraine, gold mining in

the amazon rainforest. give us an idea of the lens at which you look at those places, those instances, and what practical use you think those investigations can be. yeah. so, initially, i would say that the traces of policies, politics and incidents by governments, by police forces, by secret services, are left on the built environment to be read. and then, so in that way, you're looking at the architectural trace. but when we started in 2011, there was another technological environment that we came upon, and that was the open—source revolution. people started having phones with cameras at their disposal, and the social media platform to upload and make those materials circulate, and all of a sudden, we were exposed to an enormous amount of images and videos

that were simply not available to us previously. you didn't need to rely on a photojournalist to go to the pakistan—afg hanistan frontier to document the results of american or cia drone strikes in there. you would — you could just go online, collect the videos and analyse them. but we realised that in order to analyse those... ..those bits, fragments of media, we needed to build them into architectural environment. and at this moment, we had the architectural technique to build dynamic three—dimensional models and locate within them multiple perspectives of different phone cameras or video cameras. but... and then you can see the relation between those. - but sometimes — didn't you even

do it? — i'm thinking about the project you did on the prison in syria near damascus, where, actually, there was no video evidence. yeah. in fact, - the site was unknown. i think there weren't even necessarily satellite mapping of it. absolutely, absolutely. so what were the skills that you employed? because you were trying to essentially recreate a prison based on what detainees said. on... on their memory. in prison, there are no cameras and videos. and then you have to rely on what people say, on their testimonies. and our memory is relying on space. our memory is very spatial. i mean, you know this yourself. you go to a place where you've been and all of a sudden, memories that are associated with that space spring up. and the same is with giving

testimony. most of the people that are delivering testimonies are also very traumatised because they are asked to describe the most difficult events that they've experienced in their lives. so memory plays tricks on you — there are blackouts and there are, um, distortions. and we've worked very carefully with forensic psychologists at the forensic psychology unit at goldsmiths, in particular, to develop a system that allows witnesses to recall things that are otherwise — they would have forgotten. the prisoners in saydnaya — this is the syrian torture prison outside of damascus, where political prisoners were held by the assad government — were denied... what is called sensory deprivation. they were held in darkness. whenever the guards entered into the room, they had to be blindfolded or press their eyes against their... their hands against their eyes.

and then what was activated was their sense of hearing. and the sense of hearing is also spatial. a small room would echo, and the sounds would reverberate in a different way than a corridor or a room with a high ceiling. so through partial visual memories — the number of tiles, through the audio analysis which we've done with a very close collaborator of us, the organisation called earshot — we were able to estimate the architecture of that secret torture prison. you end up with what you would say is a credible picture, a creation, a representation... absolutely-— what is it for? what use will it be? so, you know, we understand the term forensics maybe slightly differently than the way it is commonly used. in fact, we want to go back to the roman or latin origin of the term — forensics is the art of the forum. and the forum is not only the court, it is making evidence public and it's the making evidence public, indeed, can be presented in court in defence

of people's human rights. so one day you hope for a war—crimes trial or something of that kind and you would hope that your work on syria's used in that? absolutely. i mean, the work in syria has already provided information that was used by other lawyers in a war—crime trial on syria, and we participated in many international trials worldwide, providing evidence in multiple ways. i mean, architecture can do different things. it can allow you, it can become a trigger into your memory when you walk through it. architectural models allow us to locate and synchronise multiple videos. architecture is the bearer of trace. you can analyse the rubble like an archaeologist, analyse the destruction from hundreds or thousand years ago and try to imagine from the rubble what happened there. i know that your work with the family of mark duggan,

who was shot and killed in london- - -_ ..was used by the family and was. . .— ..part of their out—of—court settlement with the metropolitan police. you've made some enemies in the course of your work. there's some quite striking criticism — whether it's german politicians saying that you're factually challenged or people around president assad saying that you're qatari stooges. you were banned, i think, from travelling to the us for some time. yes. when you... you know, all our works are targeting state agencies — military, the police, secret services — these are powerful organisations. and, of course, they would want to argue against what we are going to say. and one of the easiest way to do that is to try to undermine the credibility of what it is that you do, rather than discuss

the evidence itself. so we are used to that. you know, we've been called a fake—news organisation by the russian government, by the syrian government — indeed, also sometimes by israeli spokespersons when we are exposing their crimes. so this is part of the game. we would take a case only if the family — or the bereaved family — would approach. this is what happened in the case of mark duggan. the family and the lawyers representing the family asked us to do that. this is trust that is put into us that we respond to by enormous amount of care and attention. so imagine a second and a half talk between mark duggan leaving the minicab in which he was driving, or being driven, followed by the police force until he got shot the second time. a second and a half — to work on a second and a half you sometimes need a year, so you work for a year on a second. that's an incredible kind of, like, compression of time,

if you like. well, who funds you to do such labour—intensive work? yes. so we have research funding. so ukri is the government sort of research body that gives us a good chunk of our research, human rights organisations. but increasingly, also — and this is something that is very unique of forensic architecture — we present our evidence also in art and cultural forms. so we had exhibitions at the tate, at the whitney museum, at the whitworth in the uk, the institute of contemporary art, because we believe that we need to make our evidence public. we need to present it not only within the bureaucratic confines of the law, but we need to — if you want to make evidence political, you need it to be seen by the wider community. i still wonder, then, whether it is more art and activism than architecture. architecture is, isn't it,

at its heart, about creating something? whereas a lot of your work seems to be about pulling it apart. yeah, that is very interesting. yeah, deconstruction rather than construction. but i think that the strength of our team is its multidisciplinary nature. so most of the team are architects because they are able to understand spatial relation. but we work with lawyers — our team have lawyers — journalists are working with us, they're film—makers because a lot of the work is filmic. and even archaeologists, when we're working on... ..on more historical material, like reconstruction of historical archaeological sites... the application of our technique has now become useful for archaeological research. we've done digital archaeology in ukraine, and we've done in gaza something that we call open—source archaeology. reconstructing one of the most fabulous sites of historical

significance in gaza — the old port of gaza — and it was completely demolished during this, um... it was completely demolished in november this year. yeah, i know that you are connected in more than one way to october the 7th and the subsequent war, and you've had people you've long worked with in gaza. what do you see when you look at the conflict? are you still working on a specific project to do with it? mm. well, since october, it has been the hardest time for our group. we've experienced things both personally and emotionally in a way that was extremely difficult. the volume of our work on gaza has increased, and it's a situation that we see as a genocide, and that puts an enormous

amount of responsibility on us to work in order to do anything that we can. you're an israeli and you're calling it a genocide — which is, of course, what the israeli government would reject, and many fellow israeli citizens would reject also. of course they would reject it because they've been accused of genocide and the fact that i was born in israel, i think, allows me to understand the society in a much closer way. i think it is a genocide because there has been an intent to kill civilians here. and we see not only the intent to kill them through bombing campaign that are undertaken with indistinction, in which the intent

is to harm civilians, so as to extract political pressure on the people in gaza. and we see it in the way in which hospitals have been attacked. all hospitals in gaza have been attacked. we see it in a way in which schools have been attacked, in which all institutions have been attacked. it seems to be an intent and an action to erase the foundation of palestinian society in gaza — and it's still ongoing. israeli officials and military officers do say that they are not targeting civilians. they say it's a battle against hamas, and hamas has a network of tunnels under gaza, which were constructed through a time of blockade. mm. could you... do you think you could map those tunnels? | could you work with

the families of hostages who know that somewhere in those tunnels are their loved ones? my heart is... my heart is with the hostages. i also know a few people that were living in what is called the gaza envelope. but i don't think it is the role of a human rights organisation to undertake military surveillance, certainly not in a time of a genocide on palestinians. i think the israeli army has its own... probably one of the most robust and systematic and complete systems of surveillance that it put palestinians under, and they certainly don't need our help in mapping the tunnels. perhaps the hostage families... so this is not something that... perhaps the hostage families need your help, though. i... in a situation of armed conflict, we are not doing military research on those issues. we are looking at violations of the rights of civilians. and, indeed, i believe that

there have been war crimes committed by hamas on october 7th in the gaza envelope, and there is a genocide ongoing right now in gaza that we need to stop in all means at our disposal, at the professional means of our disposal. do you allow yourself to think about the day after, and would you ever... would you ever want to get involved in the reconstruction of gaza? i think that we need to think about reconstruction in a wider context than gaza. i think the very idea of the gaza strip, in itself, a project for reconstruction that is framed within the border of gaza, is unjust and historically naive.

i think that we need to think about palestine. i think that we need to think about the entire area. i'm — you know, as you said, i'm born in israel and i believe in justice and equality. and i believe that as an israeli jew born there, i should have exactly the same right as a palestinian that is born in that place. and i believe that in order to do that, we need a different political system — based on democracy and equality. i know that you've said that architects should be public figures, and you clearly have chosen a very... yeah. ..political way to - exercise your own profession and operate in your own profession. is there any part of you which just thinks, you know, if i was building office blocks or ordinary apartments, it would be a... it would be a simpler life? and do you look at architects who are doing that and think they�* re missing something? yeah. i mean, there's always an

architect in you, and there's definitely an architect in me. there's always a sketchbook around with all sorts of ideas that i collect for a time when it would be possible. but i feel that i have been born into a situation, and i live through a period where my skill, my... the... the architectural intelligence, if you like, that my team—mates, my colleagues, myself, can actually utilise is much more helpful right now in doing what we do in order to stand up for the rights of those people facing state violence around the world. do you think your fellow architects still see you as one of them, or have you gone out so far into this new field that you're something else entirely now? i don't know. you know, i'm invited to teach in architecture schools worldwide, from princeton to columbia university to unam in mexico city, and in many, many other universities worldwide. i see young architects

awakening. i see young architects wanting to use their skill and techniques in a political way. i see architects wanting to be more active, more politically outspoken. i see a lot of thirst for that, and that is the interest that we have. when we put up a job advertisement in forensic architecture for an architect, we have hundreds of applicants. and i believe we have really like, you know, the best team that one can imagine right now. but i feel that architecture has also transformed in recent years. the kind of the era of the star architect designer is kind of waning and sort of like, this is... ..this is passing. and the new, um... what young architects want to do are things that matter, things that protect the environment, that protect politics, that stands for human rights, etc. eyal weitzman, thank you

very much. hello. for those who saw not a huge amount of sunshine on monday, there's certainly a greater chance over the next couple of days. tuesday and wednesday, looking sunnier by and large, a lot of dry weather around, a few isolated showers. some of the dampest conditions will actually be around first thing on tuesday. through the night, into tuesday morning, this is the weather system which will be bringing outbreaks of rain or drizzle across england and wales. it does mean a lot of cloud. it also means a very warm and humid start to the day. temperatures at around 1a to 17 degrees for some across the south, but it's here where the cloud will be its thickest, some rain or drizzle, bit like we saw on monday.

the odd heavy burst, south midlands, south—east, but it's clearing away a good deal quicker than on monday, and sunshine further north and west will develop a bit more widely as we go through the day. a few isolated showers possible, a bit of a breeze down the eastern coasts, but it's around some of the coastal seas, some of the sunniest conditions during the afternoon, especially to the north and the west. and temperatures of 19 to 2a degrees are bang—on average for this stage in the year. now, as we go into tuesday evening and overnight, we start with some clear skies. varying amounts of cloud, though, or pushing in from the west, stopping it from getting too chilly, but overall, a fresher night to take us into wednesday compared with what we see into tuesday morning. now, wednesday, there will be a bit more cloud around. that cloud will thin and break. there will be some sunny spells for many, the cloud tending to be thickest towards the west, especially as we go through the day. some showery bursts of rain, a little bit of drizzle in places, too, isolated light showers further east. many, though, again, a dry day on wednesday and starting to feel a bit more humid once more.

and that humidity will last into wednesday night, but by thursday, weather systems starting to push their way in off the atlantic will bring a lot more cloud generally speaking, so it's almost as if we're back to monday. lots of cloud to begin with. there will be outbreaks of rain around. some of the heaviest could be across southern counties through the day, spreading their way eastwards. some of the brightest conditions, probably across the north—east of scotland and then later into the west of ireland. temperatures down on what we've seen through recent days. thursday night and into friday, though, that rain gradually clears, lingering longest towards the south—east and the channel islands. could be there first thing friday morning. it will shift out of the way. good, long, sunny spells for many on friday, a scattering of showers. showers most likely, though, across the north and the west of the country. and temperatures very pleasant in the sunshine too. we'll see one or two showers around on saturday, but overall through the weekend, it's turning drier and warmerfor most.

live from london, this is bbc news. kamala harris secures pledges of support from enough democratic delegates to become the party's nominee for us president. bangladesh's prime minister says a nationwide curfew imposed on friday night will be lifted

as soon as the security situation gets better. and deadly airstrikes hit southern gaza — as the israeli prime minister travels to washington for high—level meetings. hello, i'm tadhg enright. we start in the us where kamala harris says she's secured the support of enough delegates to be confirmed as the democratic nominee for president. it comes less than 48 hours afterjoe biden ended his bid for re—election and endorsed her. earlier, harris made herfirst pitch for the presidency. speaking to supporters at the democratic party headquarters in delaware, she promised more gun control and protection for reproductive rights.