Samaneh Moafi is a senior researcher at Forensic Architecture, a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, that investigates human rights violations, where she leads the Centre for Contemporary Nature. Before joining the third event in the Zócalo/University of Toronto The World We Want series, “How Do Our Cities Prepare for the Post-Apocalypse?,” Moafi spoke in the green room about simulating the spread of toxicity in air, moving from Iran to Australia, and the social wealth of rituals.
When are you at your most creative?
I think creativity comes from collaboration and from working together. Our team is a multidisciplinary team. I come from the field of architecture, but we have people who come from filmmaking, software developments, coding, gaming engine design. It’s really the intersections between us in which I’ve had the most creative moments—also collaborating with people from outside of [Forensic Architecture], journalists, frontline activists… It’s at the heart of all our work. We haven’t done a single investigation without a collaboration.
Has it been difficult to get those creative collaboration juices flowing while working remotely during the pandemic?
Yes and no. I think internally it’s been a problem, because a lot of it is when you just overhear something, or you look back at the monitor and you see something, and it suddenly kind of clicks with something else that you’re working on. That was very much the dynamic of our research unit. But of course, now if we’re talking to each other, a meeting needs to be set up. You hardly overhear something [on a Zoom call], right?
But on a different level, it’s allowed for collaborations across the globe—on a scale that we hadn’t done before. We have team members now that are based all over the world, in Canada, across Europe, in New Zealand. Also, with our collaborators on the project, we’re doing things that wouldn’t have been possible before. To meet with a frontline community activist on an online platform, and really go to the nitty-gritty stuff—that’s something that you wouldn’t actually do a couple of years ago.
You did your undergraduate and your Masters in architecture in Australia. What do you miss most about Sydney?
I miss the ocean. It was a 10-minute walk from my house, and I would see it every morning, and it’s just not something that I have anymore.
What’s been your biggest guilty pleasure during the pandemic?
Oh, gosh. I took a dive into Netflix documentaries, and I actually learned so much about history. I mean, I know that there are documentaries, and there are specific accounts of specific events, but I got to learn about events that I didn’t even know had occurred. I really took a lot of pleasure out of that.
Do you have a favorite step in the investigative or research process?
The most interesting moments for me are those moments of opening, or of learning. So first, when a project comes in, we’re learning about not only a problem, a wrongdoing, a case of violence, but also about the forms of resistance that are happening on the ground that people are doing to confront and to stop [injustice]. To learn about their techniques, and to learn how we could fit in that struggle—I always find that the most educational [and] the most enjoyable.
FA is known for its use of cutting-edge technologies and strategies. Is there a piece of equipment or technology that you’re dying to get your hands on in?
At the moment we’re working with scientists from the Imperial College on simulation of toxicity in air. I think the first time we collaborated on this, it was a case of a Nazi killing in Germany, when we wanted to simulate how far into the room the smell of gunpowder would have reached, and if a witness would have smelled it [from] a particular part of the room. We found it super interesting, the idea of being able to model a smell spatially.
The next time, we used it for an investigation on herbicidal warfare on the border of Gaza and Israel. There we had a particular time frame of the aerial sprayings that Israel was doing. It was a time [frame] of a few minutes, and we wanted to see where this aerial spraying that they’re doing is going and which farms it’s affecting, considering the wind, and the temperature, and the day. Now we’re pushing it to a few hours for kind of a territorial scale. So it’s about just pushing the tools for us. This is the one I’m working on right now, to be able to push it to a different timescale on a different territorial scale, and see what we can do.
What smell evokes the strongest memories for you?
Fresh bread and rain. But that rain that I’m talking about is not something that we can smell in London; it’s the rain of a muddy street and of my home, back in Iran.
Several of your recent exhibitions incorporate explorations of ritual. Do you have a favorite ritual that you’ve practiced throughout your life?
I find rituals such a powerful means of bringing people together [and] creating relationships that would not have occurred otherwise. It’s that social value—the social wealth in the rituals—that is so meaningful for me. A lot of the work that I did with a community in Iran was around the ritual of Nazri, which is kind of a votive meal. And we cooked together one of the classic dishes that you cook for a Nazri, called Sholeh Zard, which is like a rice pudding with a lot of saffron. You cook it on such a big scale you need a lot of people, because it takes a long time to cook.
It’s something that I’ve been part of in different stages of my life, but this was such a meaningful moment for me, to be able to do that with the community. It brought neighbors who had not really been directly in relationship with one another around this pot, and the conversations around it—there was wealth in it.
When in your life have you experienced the most culture shock?
We were always moving cities when I was a kid because of my dad’s job. When I moved out of Iran, when we moved to Sydney, Australia, and I went to high school, it was a [coed] high school, and I was very religious at the time. We don’t have [coed] schools in Iran, and so it was boys and girls, and all of a sudden, all this stuff that would happen in the bathroom! [laughs]
Where was your favorite place to go when you were a child?
The river. I just have so many memories, regardless of which city we were in, of doing a picnic near the river. If we were in Isfahan, [for example,] it would be Zayandehrood. But always this idea of, it’s a weekend, take a watermelon to the river and just sit there with family and friends. There’s something with river and watermelon… It’s not a particular place—you see I’m a migrant.