ABSTRACT
The most obviously utilitarian application of reenactment for purposes of investigation, corroboration, and proof is to reconstruct a crime scene to jog the memory of the public, who may have forgotten details of it or even the whole scene. Television shows that staged such reenactments had a great vogue two decades ago, but they have always been popular. When, in 1806, Luisa Calderon was asked by her defense lawyer to demonstrate for the jury of the court of the Kings Bench exactly how the pulleys, cords, bonds, and a wooden peg combined to place the whole weight of the body on the surface shared by the big toe and the peg in order to produce the excruciating pain of the punishment called picketing, the jurors were most attentive, and gave their verdict against her tormentor, General Picton (Pickering, 2010, pp. 124–125). Most recently, an independent agency known as Forensic Architecture has deployed digital recording equipment, satellite imaging, data-sharing platforms, and 3D modelling to produce ecologies of the spaces of injustice—for instance, Syrian prisons reserved for torture and the bombing of Rafah in Gaza—each so densely filled with simultaneous cross-corroborating evidence that something like crowd-witnessing replaces the accumulation of testimonies from single perspectives (forensic architecture). Not only is open-source citizen-led enquiry able to confront state-sponsored violence, but it also does so by means that are as much aesthetic as forensic. One of the pieces of evidence in Forensic Architecture’s investigations was a finalist in 2018 for the Turner Prize (Counter Investigations, 2018). All of these corroborative reenactments are founded on the assumption that a real event in the past has been obscured either by the imperfection of our senses and memories, or by fictions and even outright lies. Its recovery restores the truth of history, or at least it restores the irrefutable facts of sensation.
