 Hello, so I'm Martina and I'm part of the research agency for architecture based at Goldsmiths University, University of London. So we are a research agency dealing with cases of human rights violations and environmental violence and we are using architecture as evidence but also employing architectural methodologies to investigate our cases. And the case I'm going to talk about today is the killing in Umar-Hiran. In order to understand the context of this particular event I would like to just introduce you to the kind of wider problem of the situation of Bedouin villages in the Mak'ab or Negev desert in the south of Israel. So the Bedouin villages aren't recognised as legitimate settlements and the Israeli state has been systematically raiding the villages and procedurally demolishing the houses with wider plans of reforesting the desert. Here we can see the footage of, we can see a fragment of the footage of, sorry, I don't think my video is playing. Right, I'll try to verbally explain it then. So this is a fragment of the video taken by activists on the morning of 18th of January 2017 after the raid on the village of Umar-Hiran. So the event in Umar-Hiran was particularly important because it happened quite unusually during the night and early morning hours of January 18th. And during the event the police troops started spreading around the area in great numbers and one of the members of the village, Yakub Al-Kian, was trying to get out of the village. In a quick series of events his car went downhill hitting and killing a police officer Eris Levy. The car came to stop a few seconds after. At that point Yakub Al-Kian was shot twice. He was later found dead. So what I would like to talk about is how this event has been portrayed by the police in the media and how this kind of slow procedural violence that I have mentioned at the beginning has resulted in this accelerated violence on the body of Yakub Al-Kian and how the practices of this procedural violence have been kind of very difficult to track and very difficult to manifest visually. And in parallel the police has done a lot to erase any traces of this particular violence that occurred on the night of 18th of January 2017. So what is here on the screen is the first fragment of footage shared by the police with the media and it's seemingly an act of transparency. It's a footage that lasts about 30 seconds and it's taken from a helicopter. It's a thermal camera recording. So it shows bodies and any objects that emit heat in a darker colour whereas the rest of the landscape is whiter. This footage is documenting the moment in which the car of Yakub Al-Kian hits one of the police officers and this footage as much as it seems as a transparent depiction of the events has been used to manipulate the media narrative. Yakub has been later declared a terrorist by the police officers and this claim has been revered through a kind of careful investigation by forensic architecture in collaboration with the activists with active skills and later with public committee against torture in Israel. So as I said, even though this whole event was motivated by the premise of trying to demolish and erase the village, it actually was later twisted in the public media into being seemingly a terror attack. So what we have done as an agency, we tried to use the evidence gathered by the activists on the ground in order to create a counter narrative. What is important to realise is that in this kind of new techno visual landscape that is kind of available to us because of prevalence of recording media both within the police and military, pretty much all across the world, there's also availability of recording media in the hands of the activists. What we need to know now is to realise the kind of constraints and responsibility of all of this media in order to be able to talk about them and be literate in the visual language. So we understood that there are severe limitations to the footage that the police shared with the media. As you can see the metadata has been blurred out of the footage that has been played over and over and over, and in a way it has become kind of a symbol of the event itself, kind of a stand-in for the event that we later on realised is much more complex. Here we can see footage taken by one of the activists, Karen Manor, and in a way through the disruption and distortion her camera itself is capturing the violence exerted on her body. We weren't able to locate Karen in the site so what we have done is we have recreated the model of the site through the process of photogrammetry and we used her camera recording which effectively is an extension of her site in the pitch black night to map the footage onto the model and through this process we were able to identify her position within the landscape. So this is part of the footage that explains this process. In a way Karen's camera becomes the most reliable witness to the chaos and violence on the ground in the aftermath of Jakub's killing so what you can hear is the characteristic car horn which indicates that Jakub's car has already been stopped by an oncoming police car so these are moments after Jakub's killing has actually occurred. What is important is to understand that this new technological landscape which I have mentioned it also comes with another type of violence again targeted towards the activists holding the cameras. So what we will see next is a moment in which the police is targeting Karen Manor's camera in this still in the background kind of central to the image you can see a light emitted from Karen Manor's camera. In the foreground you can see a policeman aiming a sponge bullet rifle which is part of the less lethal weaponry and he's kind of angling it towards the light source. What we have done is we have mapped this exact moment captured by a GoPro body cam of one of the police officers with the landscape and with the model and we have then compared the position of Karen Manor and the model at the same time in order to try and see whether this could actually be the moment in which a sponge bullet grazed her leg. So here on the right we can see the police officer here on the left we see Karen Manor we're verifying her position with the footage and we can see that as she's shooting a bit of the footage the police officer shoots towards her and her camera drops down she later yells he almost took my leg off. So this is one of the examples in of how the activists both are able to capture the violence on site but also about how their presence changes the landscape of violence. Later on later after after the killing of Yakub Alkyan a group of activists was trying to get closer to the events and again they're being pushed away by the policemen and this is a moment in which we can see how the activists especially the activists holding the cameras are targeted with pepper spray in order to blind them and and avoid a possibility of a counter narrative a kind of an activist counter narrative being captured and later published. So once again what we have done is we have reconstructed all of the possible media sources that were available to us at this particular moment in order to understand the choreography of the events and this is a snapshot showing of how we're working. We are never able to make work in our investigations with a singular footage or a singular source and what we're always doing is to try and synchronize all possible media and recreate the event from multiple points of view. So again this is breaking up the metonymy and the singularity of that that image that was shown at the beginning the image that the police shared with the media what we're trying to do is to show multiple perspectives and understand the intricacies of the choreography and the connections between people on site. What I would like to show you next is I'm gonna have to skip this later I'm afraid. So this is the final mapping of all the media sources onto the landscape. So first we have the footage taken by one of the police officers on site then there's a GoPro of one of the other police officers. A footage taken by one of the activists Yelare Nan and a footage taken by Karen Manor. So the cones and the light cones that illuminate the landscape show us the extent of the depiction of the events and the landscape available to us through the sources. So what I would like to highlight here is that as far as there's this great opportunity coming from this new kind of visual landscape at the same time we need to be careful as to being aware about the gaps and the blind spots that the camera sources carry with them and the danger of displaying just one footage source because it does solidify the blinds even further. So what I would like to finish with is to make two major points in this case. One is that as far as the erasure happening to the villages around the macabre and macabre desert there is a persistence in erasure of the evidence and this translates on to the event in Numa Hiram in which this kind of slow and procedural violence has been accelerated by the impact exerted on Yakub Alki and his body but then the same practices of erasure have been employed by the police through the media and what is very important is to be able to work with this visual material and become literate in it. I think this is all from us. I am sure I extended my time limit but I hope that