Triple chaser, 2019 + Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe, 2020, Forensic architecture

Introduction and discussion (in Basque): Ibon Salaberria and Ula Iruretagoiena

SCREENINGS

Triple chaser, Forensic architecture, UK, 2019, 10’

When US border agents fired tear gas grenades at civilians in November 2018, photographs showed that many of those grenades were manufactured by the Safariland Group, one of the world’s major manufacturers of so-called ‘less-lethal munitions’. The Safariland Group is owned by Warren B. Kanders, the vice chair of the board of trustees of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Whereas the export of military equipment from the US is a matter of public record, the sale and export of tear gas is not. As a result, it is only when images of tear gas canisters appear online that monitoring organizations and the public can know where they have been sold, and who is using them.

But this kind of manual research is laborious, and time-consuming. Automating any part of that process could be hugely beneficial to human rights monitors, and the pursuit of corporate accountability in the global arms trade.

Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe, Lesvos, Aegean Sea, 28 October 2015, Forensic architecture, UK, 2020, 23’

On 28 October 2015, a migrant boat left the coast of Western Turkey heading to the closest European coast—the Greek island of Lesvos. The sea was rough, and the boat was old and overcrowded with more than 300 passengers. It sank 280m beyond the maritime border into Greece, in EU territorial waters, resulting in the death of at least 43 people. It was the deadliest incident in a period known as the ‘long summer of migration’, when over a million refugees and migrants attempted to reach EU shores by sea.

The incident was widely reported in international media. That reporting credited Frontex, the EU’s border agency, and the Greek coastguard, as having carried out of a successful and competent rescue operation. Our analysis disputes this, however, and opens up possibilities for civil society groups to call for accountability for lives lost in the Mediterranean.

One of the survivors, the artist Amel Alzakout recorded the journey and the shipwreck on a waterproof camera attached to her wrist. This footage provides a unique situated perspective of this tragic event at the threshold of Europe.