Tracing the 'yellow line' & 2025 in review
With best wishes for the holidays from all at Forensic Architecture
New analysis: Israel’s conduct since the ‘ceasefire’
Since the October 2025 ceasefire declaration, life and death in Gaza have been defined by the ‘yellow line’ — drawn by Israel, and dividing the Strip in two. Our evidence, laid out in thirteen maps, suggests that Israel seeks to make the line permanent, as ‘reconstruction’ plans normalise this new stage of Israel’s occupation.
Read reporting on our findings in Drop Site News and the Guardian.
East of the line is under Israeli control: all Palestinians have been forcibly expelled, and Israel has labelled the area a ‘dangerous combat zone’, shooting anyone who enters or comes near it. West of the line, Hamas is the de facto governing body. In this area, despite the terms of the ceasefire, Israel continues to target civilians, homes and infrastructure, such that nowhere in Gaza is safe.
Now, Israel appears to be turning the ‘yellow line’ into a permanent divide, expanding military infrastructure along the line and systematically clearing all land under its control. The effect is the ethnic cleansing of 53% of Gaza.
We’re still updating our navigable cartographic platform with new data such as Israel’s ongoing destruction of civilian infrastructure, and expansion of its military infrastructure.
A selected 2025 round-up
It’s been a few months since we last wrote here. What else have we been up to? A few selected highlights:
We’ve been awarded a major Discovery Award from the Wellcome Trust, to explore the intersections between race, policing, and mental health in the UK.
In August and September, we exhibited our five films on the genocides perpetrated against the Nama and Ovaherero people by German colonial forces, in a solo show at Namibia’s National Art Gallery (NAGN). Look out for those works coming to Germany and Europe in 2026-27.
In partnership with the World Peace Foundation, we produced a report on the Israeli targeting of aid infrastructure in Gaza and its systematic dismantling of the existing civilian system of aid distribution to engineer mass starvation.
We published an investigation into the 2024 police killing of Bangladeshi student protester Abu Sayed, which was marked by an exhibition and public programme held at the offices of the Drik Picture Library.
Our sister agency in Berlin, Forensis, disproved false statements made by the Berlin police, as well as media and senior federal politicians in Germany, in relation to an attack by a police officer on protesters at a demonstration in solidarity with Gaza.
We were awarded a Scripps Howard Journalism Award for Excellence in Environmental Reporting, for our work with the Guardian US on a huge chemical fire in Cancer Alley, Louisiana.
Exhibition: Looking for Palestine
Foto/Industria Biennial 2025, Bologna, Italy | extended until 11 Jan 2026
At the invitation of Foto/Industria artistic director Francesco Zanot to respond to the biennial theme of ‘home’, we curated an exhibition for the newly opened Palazzo Bentivoglio Lab in Bologna, drawing upon our last few years of research to underscore the experience of exile and loss of home and homeland as key features of the long historical continuum that unites the genocide presently unfolding in Gaza and the 1947-9 mass expulsion of Palestinians from their villages by Zionist forces, also known as the Nakba.
The exhibition brings together a selection of recent projects that expose continuities between Israeli acts and mechanisms of displacement past and present, and the durational physical and psychological trauma these cycles of dispossession produce. Our research has revealed how through indiscriminate bombardment, ground invasions, and wave upon wave of evacuation orders, Israel has sought to fracture Palestinian society in Gaza as it did during the Nakba, eroding any sense of stability around place or community to further drive displacement and disincentivize return. The featured works not only document these patterns of direct and indirect violence but also propose strategies of resistance to combat Israel’s ongoing war of erasure, with a focus on collaborative cartographic and reconstructive practices as a means of preserving Palestinian memory and reconstituting the historical record.
Read recent press coverage in Il Manifesto, the British Journal of Photography, and Juliet Art Magazine.
On view at Sottospazio, Palazzo Bentivoglio Lab in Bologna, Italy, extended until 11 January 2026
The 36th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
The People’s Court I is the first result of a planned multi-year investigation into the transatlantic petro-extractivist complex, which occupies lands and communities across the ‘Transatlantic Forest Belt’ – a speculative term for a once-contiguous Pangaean forest, long ago divided into an ‘ecological diaspora’ by plate tectonics. The remains of this tricontinental forest span from the ancient sacred groves of the Niger Delta to the burial groves of Louisiana’s historically enslaved people.
It is well known that European colonists depleted West African cultural and natural resources alongside human populations. But a story less often told is how this historical looting presaged contemporary resource extraction, driving ecological collapse. Forensic Architecture/Forensis offer their visualization tools to this story, entering through the 1897 sacking of the “Forest Kingdom” of Benin by the British.
Contesting Western legal contexts in which testimony is an institutionally regulated and circumscribed act, The People’s Court I (2025) offers a form of transgenerational testimony that is immersive and emergent, evidentiary and generative. Through live and pre-recorded depositions, witnesses take the stand within evolving digital reconstructions of transatlantic ecologies that have been uprooted and eroded along the “continuum of extractivism.”
ArtReview Power 100
For the sixth consecutive year, we are honoured to be included in ArtReview’s Power 100 list of the most influential figures and practices in contemporary art.
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Since 2010, FA has investigated state and corporate violence and human rights violations around the world, publishing over 120 investigations in support of communities and families struggling for accountability. Our work has been presented in national and international courtrooms, public inquiries, truth commissions, and citizens’ tribunals and exhibited internationally at leading cultural institutions, disseminated in partnership with major media outlets, and taught at universities worldwide.
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Best wishes from all our team for the holiday season.