I frequently visit the Forensic Architecture website, a research agency based at Goldsmiths University that investigates human rights violations. Following their projects has had a profound impact on me, even given my privileged positionality as a witness to their investigations. Their research has anchored my own knowledge of colonial violence and bio-enacted racism in the devastatingly present day. Reading traditionally published academic articles and censored news stories feels utterly static in comparison to FA’s data, inclusive of simulations, 3D modelling, and software development.

Through their deeply alert and responsible inquiries, Forensic Architecture has successfully driven policy changes that are civilian-centred, focusing the lens on vulnerable people. FA compiles and documents irrefutable evidence. They fill in the gaps for narratives that have, strategically, entered mainstream media and reportage with missing and skewed information.  

I first came across Forensic Architecture in Manchester in 2021. I’d arrived early for a poetry performance and decided to visit The Whitworth as it was nearby the venue. The gallery was showing FA’s Cloud Studies, an exhibition on how today’s clouds are ‘both environmental and political’ with case studies from Palestine to Beirut, London to Indonesia, and the US-Mexican border—

Mobilised by state and corporate powers, toxic clouds colonise the air we breathe across different scales and durations. Repressive regimes use tear gas to clear democratic protests from urban roundabouts. Carcinogenic plumes of petrochemical emissions smother racialised communities. Airborne chemicals such as chlorine, white phosphorous, and herbicides, are weaponised to displace and terrorise. Forest arson in the tropics creates continental-scale meteorological conditions, forcing millions to breathe toxic air.

I often use the words ‘nature writer’ in the context of my work. In fact, I throw it around with such frequency that it starts to feel meaningless, without any real definition. These words try to easily categorise a kind of work that is beyond easy categorisation. Sometimes, I get the sense that nature writing’s popularity aligns with its palatable broadness—the way it can be easily framed as, to a degree, apolitical (hence its palatability). It’s nice and comfortable to eschew less feel-good nature writing under the framework of ecopoetics if you want to be a political nature poet after all. Genre and subgenre allow audiences to find or avoid perceived neutrality in what they read.

‘Nature writing,’ like many other popularised and marketable genres, feels condemned to a reading practice that suits the needs of the literary industry’s metallic-tasting and unappetising machinery.

But I think it is impossible to write responsibly about nature without also considering the history of empire, without at least acknowledging, in some way, an ongoing settler colonialism or the legacies of imperialism around the world. All of this has shaped, revised, and affected land(scape) in a very real way, and in turn, has also established the various relationships a person might have to the land. Turning away from the multifaceted and entangled realities of such things is a position not everyone can afford.

Last week, I visited the Aburi Botanical Gardens in Ghana, and of course it felt immediately soothing to emerge onto a walkway lined with beautiful royal palm trees, especially after inching forward in Accra’s traffic while in the muggy heat on our way to the Akwapim-Togo Range. While there, I marvelled at the huge elliptical and vibrant green calabash fruit that was so heavy, it pulled the plant’s branches down closer to the earth. I felt genuinely delighted in my smallness next to impossibly large monstera leaves.

However, despite its current role in bio conservation and modern agriculture, the history of the garden is one rooted in the occupation of land by an oppressor. 6.8 hectares of land were cleared and cultivated in the mountainous region during the British colonial era, and British curators implanted species from South and Southeast Asia among many other places. A plaque at the entrance of the gardens lists the garden’s past curators and botanists, and the earlier names are distinctly British. The gardens were created as a place for colonial officers to be comfortable, their location in the Akuapem Mountains selected to allow them to recuperate from the heat. The word ‘recuperate’ has never made me recoil more. Who was/is the nature cure for? This is a question that reverberates into the present day. In touring the gardens, I felt both unease and green-inspired calm. One truth didn’t replace the other.

Forensic Architecture’s Cloud Studies exhibit is an environmental art piece and a mode of activism. Online materials posted about Cloud Studies emphasise ‘how power reshapes the very air we breathe.’ A few months after my visit to Manchester, in August 2021, and in relation to their Whitworth exhibit, the agency posted a statement of solidarity with Palestine after an (another) attack by Israel’s occupation forces. ‘The ferocity of the bombing produced man-made environmental disasters’ said their statement, and combined with attacks on agricultural storage facilities, this resulted in toxic fumes covering residential areas. Weaponising the environment is a recurring theme. In 2019, FA published materials related to ‘herbicidal warfare’ in which Israel military forces mobilise the wind to carry chemicals into Gaza. ‘Each spray’ FA writes ‘leaves behind a unique destructive signature.’ This destroys crops and farmlands; it destroys livelihoods and lives.

Thinking of FA prompts my thinking, also, of the following two quotations from Postcolonial Ecologies (Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley) that have guided my work in ecological writing.

• ‘The decoupling of nature and history has helped to mystify colonialism’s histories of forced migration, suffering, and human violence.’

• ‘To separate the history of empire from ecocritical thought dehistoricizes nature and often contributes to a discourse of green orientalism.’

The land—whether interpreted as ‘nature’ [neutral] or as ‘weaponised’ [political]—is an element inseparable from imperialism and settler-colonialism. In Culture and Imperialism, Palestinian scholar Edward Said wrote: ‘Because of the presence of the colonizing outsider, the land is recoverable at first only through imagination.’ At first. At first. Imagination, the literary imagination, may initially allow for the conceptualisation of freedom.

After decades-long violent occupation in Palestine, what are the limits of literature, of imagination, relative to the need to act and obtain tangible freedom.

Watch Cloud Studies: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/cloudstudies