RAFAH: BLACK FRIDAY, 2015

Having worked on the Rafah project quite a bit, I have found a strange poetry in these bomb plumes.  Their obscure ever-changing morphology offers a time signature for us, but they also manifest a very significant moment when architecture turns into dust and its image becomes an abstraction of all the lives who have also disappeared within the cloud.
Christina Varvia, Forensic Architecture, Nov 2015

For the project Rafah: Black Friday Forensic Architecture collaborated with Amnesty International to provide a detailed reconstruction of the events in Rafah, Gaza, from 1 August until 4 August 2014.

In order to reconstruct the timeline of battle from images and videos found on mainstream and social media, Forensic Architecture created an archive of smoke clouds and used these clouds as fingerprints locating the strikes by triangulating the shape of the clouds and timing it by its development. The strike on the Al Tannur neighbourhood was extensively recorded and therefore became the hinge that allowed Forensic Architecture to unlock the whole day of events. In this incident they were able to identify the airdropped bombs to be of one tonne each, the largest within the Israeli arsenal. 

More info about Rafah: Black Friday 
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Forensic Architecture (UK)

Forensic Architecture is a research project based at Goldsmiths, University of London. The project, founded in 2011, has assembled a team of architects, artists, filmmakers, activists, and theorists to undertake research that gathers and presents spatial analysis in legal and political forums. Their investigations provide evidence for international prosecution teams, political organisations, NGOs, and the United Nations. Additionally, the project undertakes critical examinations of the history and present status of forensic practices in articulating notions of public truth.