GEORGE PROCHNIK: I’d like to begin by having you review the concept of the climactic threshold, which you discuss in your book, and why this marker became, in your phrase, “the conflict shoreline."

EYAL WEIZMAN: There is a long history of debates about what defines the threshold of the desert. The designation was important because both for the Ottoman Empire and later for the British one it delineated a zone that, although nominally within the imperial “territories,” lay outside their full control and was partially autonomous. It’s obvious why: these empires didn’t always have the economic incentive to govern in the desert. It was more lightly populated and, except when minerals or oil were at stake, had little apparent value. I got interested in the relation between the production of a certain meteorological classification, its cartographic delineation, and a shift in techniques of governance and law. Anyone living near “the threshold of the desert” knows that it’s an ambiguously defined zone, which might shift over the years dozens of kilometers north or south of any mean line. Historically, all along the desert threshold as it extends for thousands of kilometers through the different political units that compose the “Orient” two processes can be identified. The first involves attempts to identify, delineate, and map this line, and the second entails the understanding of the environmental threshold line as a project — that is, something which can be influenced and shifted. Colonial governors attempted to push away that desert line, while extending the zone of agrarian lands by changing the local climate.

The designation of that threshold makes it a target for change: both in terms of arability, and in terms of the law.

Exactly. Shifting a climactic threshold is also shifting the “nomos of the earth” — its legal reality. This entangled colonial relationship to the climate demonstrates what I consider to be the most fundamental omission in the current debate around climate change. Even the most militant environmentalists still regard climate change as the “collateral of history” — the unintended byproduct of industrial development, trade, and transport; whereas I see it as the intention, the very telos, of the colonial project. On the subject of the collateral, human rights activists might have something to contribute to climate activists. When a military claims that such and such people were killed as a collateral effect of our attempt to hit this or that target, our warning lights start flashing — is it really so? Do civilian casualties not sometimes serve a military purpose, becoming, for instance, a component in a policy of deterrence?

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Along with counter-cartography, this also entails a form of counter-surveillance. I was struck by a recent discussion in which you were asked to critique the rise of surveillance technology and you made the point that while in some ideal world perhaps there would be no CCTV footage or what have you, we live in a super-monitored world and we need to look at how these kinds of technology can be repurposed to serve political ends we want to advance rather than simply surrendering the capacities to their officially designated function.

Yes, we have recently used CCTV footage from a security camera on a Palestinian shopfront to build a model that confirmed the intentional killing of two Palestinian teenagers by an Israeli soldier. Every image is a site of conflict. The politics of images is not predetermined by the technology they were captured in — whether CCTV or satellite — but depends on its specific use and requires a careful reading, interpretative labor, and strong argumentation to be turned into useful evidence. We also need to understand what can never be gleaned from these images, to be attuned to what has not and can’t be captured, to what has been erased, and to what could never be represented.

You used the evocative phrase, “the threshold of detectability.”

It’s the moment just before a film becomes illegible when the nature of an object caught on film is ambiguous. Is it there, is it not? When the single silver salt grain on the molecular level of the film is as large as the object it represents — as was the case with the wells or gravesites we were looking for in huge magnifications of RAF photographs of the threshold of the desert taken in the 1940s — these questions become absolutely vital. Sometimes life at the threshold of the desert depends on what can be seen at the threshold of detectability within these images.

That’s beautifully put and leads me to one final point. Reading your work and seeing in many Forensic Architecture projects how you make use of hundreds, even thousands of images that are then dissected, taxonomized, and aggregated in all sorts of complex ways only made possible by recent technology, I was thinking how as a society we increasingly navigate space through screens and projected layers of image-based information — whether it’s through our smart devices or larger state and corporate platforms, or other interventions into hard space. It’s almost as though what Forensic Architecture has undertaken also involves the creation of an architecture of these images themselves, which we’re otherwise just buried in — collapsing beneath.

Yes, our practice deals with architecture on many levels. We look at structures like building surveyors, and we also look at the physical architecture of photographs — the topography of silver salts, and the spatial relations between multiple images. But there’s also another important architectural dimension for Forensic Architecture: it’s not only that we look at architecture as evidence, but, at its best and whenever possible, we seek to begin conceptualizing new kinds of forums. For evidence to become legally or politically legible it needs a forum. But forums are not necessarily courts. When such forums do not exist or are shown — as in the case of the trial of al-‘Araqīb — to be extremely biased, new forums have to be established. The Zochrot Truth Commission is one such alternative forum. We are assembling it at the threshold of the desert, on the 200 mm line, in collaboration with the people who are struggling to remain there. We will build the physical framework for the forum on one of the last weekends of the year, because this way we can guarantee ourselves a few days before the authorities come along to demolish it. It will be an activist forum, political, historical, and citizen-organized, involving the stakeholders, lawyers, and scientists among many others. We know that after the weekend the bulldozers will come.