Running time: 30 mins
Genre:
Release Date: 09/02/2025
UK Premiere of Forensic Architecture’s The Massacre at Tur Al-Zagh: Al-Dawayima, 29 October 1948
Followed by a moderated conversation with Salman Abu Sitta, Mohammad Rajab Abu Khudra, Mohammad Al-Qaisiyeh, and Ahmad Adarbeh
Based in London at Goldsmiths, University of London, the research group Forensic Architecture (FA) emerged as a critical practice dedicated to challenging settler-colonial violence in Palestine with locally situated counter-investigations. Its work has expanded globally to offer groundbreaking investigations into state, corporate, and colonial crimes. For the past three years, FA has been working on a series of investigative projects gathering and analysing visual and cartographic evidence of the ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of Palestinians in and around 1948 by Zionist and Israeli forces. Focusing on continuities in Palestine’s ongoing Nakba and its history of settler colonialism, FA researchers have worked closely with Palestinian witnesses to and living survivors of these massacres to record their testimonies, using immersive architectural modelling as a tool of recollection to reconstruct their lost life-worlds and uncover new evidence of Israeli crimes.
Premiering for the first time in the UK, FA’s latest investigative project examines a massacre perpetrated by Zionist paramilitary groups and Israeli forces, and the forced depopulation of the Palestinian village Al-Dawayima—one of over 500 villages occupied in 1948. In the current context of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, this project speaks to the perpetuation of colonial practices aimed at systematically destroying Palestinian life, culture, and infrastructure.
The screening will be followed by a discussion between Salman Abu Sitta, founder and president of the Palestine Land Society, and former Al-Dawayima residents Mohammad Rajab Abu Khudra, Mohammad Al-Qaisiyeh, and Ahmad Adarbeh, moderated by FA researchers and Palestinian editor Hazem Jamjoum.
Event in English and Arabic with live translation.