They Are Shooting at Our Shadows

The Al-Haq Forensic Architecture Investigation Unit and Rachel Nelson (Visualizing Abolition) in conversation with Laliv Melamed and Pooja Rangan

This conversation documents an exhibition that opened before it could be installed and which was, in the words of its curator, “never finished.” It is an effort by two documentary scholars, focused on humanitarian and settler-colonial media, to examine a collaboration between an abolitionist art initiative in Santa Cruz, California, and the forensic investigative unit of a Palestinian human rights organization in the occupied West Bank. Collectively, we surface and reflect on some of the latent assumptions and practices involved in gathering and presenting forensic evidence. Our shared account of forensics and its limitations is informed by the current moment, in which Palestinian human rights organizations have been criminalized, civil society infrastructures have been fractured and destroyed, and the ongoing brutality of Israeli occupation has been transformed into an active genocide.