Reenactment has a long history in forensics. Police have long made those suspected of committing a crime reenact the events of which they are accused, often at the end of an investigation, as an individual’s admission of guilt.

In Forensic Architecture’s practice, reenactment takes a number of forms, but is always a means of testing real-world phenomena—smoke dissipation, for example, or the movement of a car down a hill—against results derived from digital simulation. This is a process we refer to as ‘ground truthing’.