AA alumnus Eyal Weizman has been interviewed by Nick Axel for e-flux, in a piece that covers Forensic Architecture’s work on testimony, memory and trauma with witnesses and victims of human rights violations.

Commenting on their work with those imprisoned in Saydnaya military prison in Syria, and the effect that trauma has on victims, Weizman highlights that:

‘Trauma often causes an understanding of a particular situated experience to be lost. This means that as the interviewer, in the early stages of an interview, you need to be tuned both to understanding the descriptions you are being told and also to the potential errors within it. Errors are information in their own right.’

Weizman describes the painstaking process by which memories are reconstructed through a process of interviews, modelling and psychological support:

‘Then there’s a circular process of negotiation in which memory incrementally starts building, detailing, refining the space, and at the same time, the space starts elucidating the memory. This is a crucial moment and it’s very volatile. It has much potential, but also involves great risks.’

This process of reconstructing, and modelling the spaces in which trauma occurred form an important part of the recovery process:

‘The models we’ve built with these witnesses, from their memories, allow them often to externalize what is otherwise and sometimes inaccessibly in their heads. They can see themselves. They can study the building as if from the outside. The models allow people to say “now that you have created this model, I can start to forget.”’

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