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<p>This article offers a biosemiotic and environmental memory reading of Forensic Architecture/Forensis’ investigation, <i>The Environmental Continuum of Genocide in Namibia</i>. Focusing on the long afterlife of German colonial violence against Ovaherero and Nama communities, the study argues that the project treats Namibian landscapes not as neutral backdrops but as more-than-human archives that store and transmit memories of ecocide and genocide. The article’s central claim is that FA makes environmental change legible as a form of <i>environmental witnessing</i>—a more-than-human evidentiary practice in which ecological transformation functions as testimonial trace of the ecocide–genocide continuum. To this end, the article’s primary contribution is to develop <i>entangled ecological memory</i> as a framework for analyzing how memory is distributed across landscape materialities (soil, vegetation, hydrology), intergenerational Indigenous testimony, and forensic visualization technologies that translate ecological traces into forensic claims. Drawing on environmental memory and semiotic fitting, the analysis traces how precolonial grassland consortia and herder–land relations constituted a finely tuned semiotic ecology that was violently ruptured by colonial Lebensraum politics and cadastral regimes. Framing FA’s practice this way clarifies why the investigation is not only representational but activist. It re-narrates landscapes against colonial erasure by converting environmental traces into contestatory memory claims, thereby opening a space to rethink transitional justice as a more-than-human field of responsibility, evidence, and repair.</p>

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Entangled Ecological Memory: Forensic Biosemiotics and the Environmental Continuum of Genocide in Namibia

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年4月7日

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  • Rania Magdi Fawzy

摘要

This article offers a biosemiotic and environmental memory reading of Forensic Architecture/Forensis’ investigation, The Environmental Continuum of Genocide in Namibia. Focusing on the long afterlife of German colonial violence against Ovaherero and Nama communities, the study argues that the project treats Namibian landscapes not as neutral backdrops but as more-than-human archives that store and transmit memories of ecocide and genocide. The article’s central claim is that FA makes environmental change legible as a form of environmental witnessing—a more-than-human evidentiary practice in which ecological transformation functions as testimonial trace of the ecocide–genocide continuum. To this end, the article’s primary contribution is to develop entangled ecological memory as a framework for analyzing how memory is distributed across landscape materialities (soil, vegetation, hydrology), intergenerational Indigenous testimony, and forensic visualization technologies that translate ecological traces into forensic claims. Drawing on environmental memory and semiotic fitting, the analysis traces how precolonial grassland consortia and herder–land relations constituted a finely tuned semiotic ecology that was violently ruptured by colonial Lebensraum politics and cadastral regimes. Framing FA’s practice this way clarifies why the investigation is not only representational but activist. It re-narrates landscapes against colonial erasure by converting environmental traces into contestatory memory claims, thereby opening a space to rethink transitional justice as a more-than-human field of responsibility, evidence, and repair.