Forensics and Fora: Reconstructing and Re-membering the Centre d’Identification de Vincennes (CIV)

Between early 1959 and the declaration of Algerian independence in summer 1962, the Centre d’Identification de Vincennes (CIV) was the primary place where Algerian-French workers picked up during nightly police raids were triaged, interrogated, and far worse. Though this “identification center” and “administrative interment” site is consistently referred to in histories of the Algerian War, the CIV has, for over five decades, evaded location and escaped description as a space and place that was itself a contributor to the violence enacted against this community. Forensic architecture, as a set of methods developed through Eyal Weizman’s eponymous lab (Forensic Architecture or FA), expands the tools and purview of architectural practice to include the “production of architectural evidence and to its presentation in juridical and political forums.”1 These techniques “focus attention on the materiality of the built environment and its media representations”2 as forms of evidence. The relatively recent development of such methods may explain how the razed CIV’s space, place and events that occurred there remained obfuscated for so long. This paper discusses the architectural methods used to produce evidence of the CIV’s location, to virtually reconstruct its material architecture, to speculate on its immaterial atmospheres, and the centrality of these methods to make this architecture knowable as a contributor to state sanctioned violence. Forensic evidence demands a forum; thus, the conclusion discusses spatial and performative fora as potential frameworks for revealing and debating such hidden histories and for collective remembering.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.110.59

Volume Editors
Robert Gonzalez, Milton Curry & Monica Ponce de Leon

ISBN
978-1-944214-40-1