Fire ← Forensic Architecture

I.110 The Evros/Meriç River: A Century of Border Design

Date of Incident: 1926 – 2025
Location: Evros/Meriç river, Greece/Turkey
Forums: Web Platform
In Partnership With: Self-Initiated
Summary: First drawn a century ago, the border that separates Greece from Turkey along the Evros/Meriç river at the EU’s southeastern frontier is deadlier and more opaque than ever. FA/Forensis built an interactive platform that unpacks this complex and lethal border infrastructure, and examines the present-day condition of the border against the transformation of the river landscape over the past century.

Date of Incident: 24 Aug 2023 – 28 Aug 2023
Location: Garyville, Louisiana, USA
Forums: Media, Web Platform
In Partnership With: The Guardian, Earthjustice, Healthy Gulf, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, The Descendants Project, Boundless Community Action
Summary: When a leaking petrochemical tank at the Marathon Petroleum refinery in Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ caught fire, it produced a thick plume of toxic smoke that spread for miles over neighbouring communities. Authorities claimed that nearby residents were unaffected, even as reports of severe health impacts emerged. Fearing a cover-up, some of those residents asked FA to investigate.

Date of Incident: 14 Jun 2017
Location: Grenfell Tower, North Kensington, London
Forums: Citizens' Tribunal, Media
Commissioned By: A coalition of lawyers representing bereaved families, survivors and affected local residents
Summary: The Grenfell Tower Fire was a generational tragedy for London and the UK, ultimately claiming 72 lives. Using a technique called 'situated testimony', we produced seven video interviews with bereaved family members, survivors, and nearby residents, aided by a 3D model of the tower and its surrounding environment. These interviews were screened for the first time as part of Grenfell Testimony Week.

Date of Incident: 3500 BC – Ongoing
Location: Nebelivka, Ukraine
Forums: Exhibition
In Partnership With: David Wengrow
Summary: In partnership with David Wengrow, this project combines archaeological science with the tools of Forensic Architecture to examine the 6,000-year-old remains of the city of Nebelivka. By reading the soil as an archaeological artefact in its own right, a lost tradition of urban life is unearthed, offering a lens through which to interrogate core assumptions about urban space, power, and ecology.

Date of Incident: 08 Sep 2020
Location: Lesvos, Greece
Forums: Legal Process, Exhibition, Media
Commissioned By: Lawyers for the Moria 6
Summary: The fire which destroyed the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesvos was at least the 247th outbreak to have occurred in and around the overcrowded camp since 2013. Six young asylum seekers who came to be known as the 'Moria 6' were accused of arson and jailed. FA and Forensis reconstructed the fire’s spread, casting significant doubt on the basis for those convictions.

Date of Incident: 04 Aug 2020 – Ongoing
Location: Beirut, Lebanon
Forums: —
In Partnership With: Febrayer Network
Summary: Following the 2020 Beirut port explosion, the city's grain silos suffered a prolonged period of steady ruination. To understand how the gradual destruction of a ruin happened behind state cordons in the nearly two-year period since the blast, Febrayer and FA reconstructed the site to present a unified account of the state’s mismanagement of this important site of material evidence and memory.

Date of Incident: 04 Aug 2020
Location: Beirut, Lebanon
Forums: Media
In Partnership With: Febrayer Network
Summary: This investigation examines the validity of the most widely accepted theory to explain what triggered the deadly blast in the port of Beirut on 4 August 2020. Lebanese and international authorities, as well as the FBI and the Lebanese Internal Security, claimed the fire that in turn instigated the explosion was caused by the shoddy work of Syrian welders—but our analysis challenges these claims.

Date of Incident: 15 May 2021
Location: Gaza, Palestine
Forums: Legal Process, Media
In Partnership With: Al-Haq
Summary: Marking the launch of Al-Haq’s Forensic Architecture Investigation Unit based in Ramallah, we examined the circumstances of the 15 May 2021 Israeli bombing of the Khudair Pharmaceuticals and Agricultural Tools Company in Beit Lahiya—the largest agricultural chemical warehouse in Gaza—as part of the environmental disaster imposed on Palestinians.

Date of Incident: 04 Aug 2020
Location: Beirut, Lebanon
Forums: Media
In Partnership With: Mada Masr
Summary: The explosions that ripped through the port of Beirut in 2020 devastated the city, leaving as many as 300,000 homeless. Following calls for an independent investigation, we mapped the contents of the warehouse where the blast originated and the spread of fire that instigated it, and have released our 3D models of the incident as a free resource for investigators and civil society.

Date of Incident: 2011 – 2016
Location: West Papua, Indonesia
Forums: Media
In Partnership With: Greenpeace International
Summary: An Indonesian-Korean palm oil conglomerate named Korindo intentionally used fires as part of the process of clearing vast areas of forest in remote areas of the Indonesia province of Papua.

Date of Incident: 14 Jun 2017
Location: London, UK
Forums: Media
Commissioned By: Self-Initiated
Summary: The Grenfell Tower fire was unprecedented in UK history—not least because of the scale of publicly available information about the night. We are building an interactive platform that will synthesise that information to create the most comprehensive account of what exactly happened that night.

Date of Incident: 11 Sep 2012
Location: Karachi, Pakistan
Forums: Legal Process
Commissioned By: European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR)
Summary: 260 people died when fire broke out in a factory that made textiles for a German retailer. We exposed failings of regulation and inspection, from overcrowding to a lack of fire escapes, in support of a legal claim against the retailer that could break new ground in corporate responsibility.

Date of Incident: 01 Jun 2015 – 01 Oct 2015
Location: Kalimantan and Sumatra, Indonesia
Forums: Exhibition
Commissioned By: FIBGAR - Fundación Internacional Baltasar Garzón
Summary: In Kalimantan and Sumatra, fires consumed over 21,000sq. km of forest and farmland in 2015. Combining fieldwork with satellite image analysis, we established that drainage and ‘monocropping’ by agricultural corporations were direct causes, supporting calls for recognition of a new crime: ecocide.