In the 1990s, Goldsmiths college in London spawned the YBAs. Now, it has incubated a very different group – whose work is as likely to turn up in an international court as in a gallery

Up a narrow staircase at the labyrinthine Goldsmiths college in London is an airy room where researchers, film-makers, AI experts, investigative journalists and archaeologists pore over computer screens. This is the nerve centre of Forensic Architecture, the research agency that was a strong contender for the 2018 Turner prize (they lost out to Charlotte Prodger) and which has gained a name for its meticulous “counter-forensic” investigations into human rights abuses.

In this post-truth era, verification is paramount, so myriad documentation sources have to be corroborated in minute detail. On a recent visit I paid them, researchers were synchronising police bodycam film and extended thermal footage with film shot by an activist. Someone else was scrutinising CCTV footage connected to the recent unsolved murder of an LGBTQ activist in Greece. The investigative film-maker Laura Poitras was visiting and journalists from the New York Times had been over to learn about setting up a visual investigations unit. A team is currently training Chicago activists to respond to police violence.

Goldsmiths is once again the incubator of a new movement, 30 years after Damien Hirst and his fellow students swaggered into British art history with the landmark exhibition Freeze. But where the Young British Artists were about ego and in-your-face art, with its sharks and suggestive arrangements of kebabs and fried eggs, this is collaborative, research based and politically committed, spanning architecture, journalism, law and science. As with all the most interesting movements, there’s controversy over whether it’s even art.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Strong contender … Forensic Architecture at the Turner prize exhibition in 2018. Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA

This movement has emerged and takes its name from the Centre for Research Architecture (CRA) at Goldsmiths. Research architecture has nothing to do with designing buildings but everything to do with the politics of space, especially how it is manipulated by states and corporations against civilians and the environment – from drone strikes in Pakistan to mining in the Amazon. Using sophisticated technologies such as remote sensing, 3D modelling and vessel-tracking, hard evidence of wrongdoing is gathered. The final work is as likely to be presented in an international court as in an art gallery. Evidence compiled by Forensic Architecture has been submitted to the International Criminal Court on Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza; to the Inter-American court on Guatemala’s genocide; and to the European Court of Human Rights on Italy’s role in migrant drowning deaths.

“We are confrontational, interventional,” says architect and activist Eyal Weizman, founder of Forensic Architecture, the most high-profile group to emerge from the CRA. As well as a research agency, Forensic Architecture has also evolved into an investigative, case-driven discipline within the broader field of research architecture. “There’s this idea of really working as detectives,” explains Lorenzo Pezzani, who has collaborated with the group and teaches a course in forensic architecture at the CRA.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sea Watch v Libyan Coast Guard, Central Mediterranean Sea … a past investigation by Forensic Oceanography and Forensic Architecture

Serving as a petri dish for this new field, the CRA was set up as a postgraduate faculty at Goldsmiths by Weizman in 2005. Fourteen years of experimentation later, it is, according to Polly Staple of the Chisenhale Gallery, one of the most important creative bases in the UK. “It offers,” she says, “a radically different position to that which is understood as ‘art’ and ‘culture’ by mainstream media and the art market.”

This is not art destined for collectors' homes. The CRA are confronting power structures responsible for violence, and uncovering hidden stories

This is not an art destined for collectors’ homes. It’s not about beautiful paintings or even self-expression. Students and staff at the CRA are passionately confronting the power structures responsible for violence and destruction, employing multiple journalistic and technological tools to uncover hidden stories. They call themselves “spatial practitioners” rather than architects or artists, since exhibiting their films, images, installations and books in galleries is just one aspect of their work, which also includes teaching, collaborating with experts and ongoing research. Whether they’re investigating claims of a so-called climate refugee community in Alaska threatened by the impact of global warming or Australia’s violations against immigrants offshore, their aim is to effect political change.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sound effects … Lawrence Abu Hamdan presents ‘ear witness’ findings. Photograph: Maureen Paley Gallery

Recently, CRA graduate Lawrence Abu Hamdan staged a show that centred on the notion of “ear witness” testimony. In 2016, Abu Hamdan worked with Forensic Architecture and Amnesty to conduct interviews with former detainees of Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison, where inmates are mostly kept in darkness and sound is used as a weapon of torture, about what they heard. The result of this collaboration was presented last year to a German prosecutor in a petition against the Syrian government. For his show, Abu Hamdan displayed a selection of objects such as a popcorn maker, a car door and cannelloni pasta as a sound effects library, objects which could make the sound of a punch, kick or gunshot.

Where Abu Hamdan explores audio, Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual of the duo Cooking Sections look at the world through the lens of food. Their long-term project Climavore promotes the idea of adapting food production and consumption to climate change. Last year the pair built a structure in Skye that functions both as an oyster farm at high tide and a dining table at low tide, where convivial discussions are held with residents, farmers, politicians and fishermen about viable alternatives to Skye’s damaging salmon farming industry. “One of the great things we learned at the centre was how do you really engage with these different stakeholders and agents working in the field?” says Schwabe.

The centre grew out of the lack of an architecture discipline at Goldsmiths, but given the college’s long history of experimentation and activism, it was never going to be a traditional course. “There was a sense that new social and political conditions were unfolding in which new practices and thinkers were urgently needed,” says centre director Susan Schuppli, whose own practice explores the legal and aesthetic implications of damaged ecologies and pollution. Her recent project Nature Represents Itself used aerial, underwater and satellite imagery, as well as CGI simulation, to argue that the swirling oil slick from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico amounted to a kind of camera-less photography, a chemical reaction caused by hydrocarbon atoms interacting with water and sunlight.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cooking Sections’ Climavore project on the Isle of Skye – bringing fish farmers together in discussion. Photograph: Colin Hattersley

Weizman launched the centre as a peer-to-peer PhD programme and brought in like-minded thinkers such as curator Anselm Franke, film-maker Angela Melitopoulos and Céline Condorelli, an artist and architect. This first phase of the centre was known as Round Table One, because a huge round table was the gathering point for fierce debates among participants and guest speakers. They realised their combined intellectual resources could be a powerful practical tool. “What made Round Table so unique was it didn’t have to deliver architects,” says Condorelli. “Architecture is very much a methodology used to look at the world, it’s not an object of study at the CRA.”

Since those early days, CRA graduates have spearheaded innovations in diverse fields. Lebanese-British practitioner Helene Kazan is pushing to extend international law to further protect the individual in conflict zones. Her video Masking Tape Intervention: Lebanon 1989 takes as its starting point her father’s photo of their kitchen with masking tape gridding the window to prevent shelling from shattering the glass during Lebanon’s civil war. Paulo Tavares focuses on land and human rights violations in Amazonia, using complex mapping of plants and trees, as well as testimonies from indigenous communities, to argue for the forest to have legal rights as a civic entity.

The sea is the arena of Lorenzo Pezzani and film-maker Charles Heller, together known as Forensic Oceanography. Their 2011 project The Left-to-Die Boat drew on an astonishing array of surveillance tools to document the case of a distressed migrant boat from Libya that was left to drift for two weeks without intervention from nearby Nato vessels, resulting in the death of 63 migrants.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘New practices and thinkers were urgently needed’ … CRA director Susan Schuppli. Photograph: Teri Pengilley/Guardian

For its Turner prize show, Forensic Architecture’s multimedia display unravelled the cover-up of the killing of a Bedouin Palestinian teacher by Israeli police during a demolition operation in a Bedouin village. “[The police] were absolutely stunned by the level of analysis that was unleashed on the case. Never has there been a group of modellers, architects, sound analysts doing that. We just decided to focus on that case because we thought it was paradigmatic enough,” says Weizman. Sifting through information displayed in film, maps, tweets and models is a big ask of the viewer, but it’s impossible not to be gripped by the unfolding narrative that’s all the more shocking because it’s real.

It's a different set of tools to understand the world and change perspectives. Is it art, journalism, documentary film-making, or architecture? Maybe it's all of the above

Of course the question that comes up from viewers – and even other artists – is: where’s the art? One might trace research architecture’s lineage to the protest art of the 60s, to social realism, to relational aesthetics, which focuses on social engagement, and to the activist strain of much post-internet art. But ultimately does it matter if it doesn’t conform to conventional notions of art?

“What Forensic Architecture propose is a different language,” says ICA director Stefan Kalmár. “It’s a different set of tools to understand the world and change perspectives. Is it art, journalism, documentary film-making, or architecture? Maybe it’s all of the above or maybe it’s a new art form. We don’t know.”

In fact, galleries can be vital forums for the public to access such evidence of state and corporate abuse. Thousands of people saw Forensic Architecture’s exhibition at the 2017 art festival Documenta in Kassel, Germany, showing its investigation into alleged state collusion in a neo-Nazi racist killing in the city – which put pressure on the German parliamentary inquiry to accept their findings as evidence in the legal proceedings.

“Every time we expose a violation, we crack a little bit the monopoly that states and governments think they have over information around incidents or around battlefields,” says Weizman. “They think they control the space militarily, imagistically and analytically. Every time you break that, they need to realign, to change the ways they work.”