Exile-Image and the Fragility of Networked Memory: Forensic Architecture’s Gaza Platforms as Interactive Archival Infrastructures
by Hudson Moura
𝗔𝗯𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁
This paper advances Exile-Image as a theoretical and methodological framework for analysing interactive forensic platforms as apparatuses that render the yet-to-be-known partially knowable—without converting uncertainty into narrative closure. Building on my work on exile as an aesthetic–epistemic condition, I define Exile-Image as the state in which images, testimonies, and traces are dislodged from historical continuity and compelled to circulate as fragments whose intelligibility depends on procedures of selection, correlation, and reassembly.
I develop this argument through a comparative analysis of Forensic Architecture’s platform-based investigations on Gaza, focusing on four cases: The Gaza Platform: Israel’s 2014 Offensive (interactive cartography and strike databases), A Cartography of Genocide: Israel’s Conduct in Gaza since October 2023, Humanitarian Violence in Gaza (evacuation orders, “safe routes,” “safe zones”), and Destruction of Medical Infrastructure in Gaza (three interlinked web platforms documenting attacks on medical facilities). Here, interactivity must be theorized as an epistemic form that makes uncertainty legible: users encounter events as provisional assemblages whose meaning emerges through navigation across scales, temporalities, and evidentiary registers. Rather than treating these works as repositories of proof, I examine them as procedural regimes of visibility—interfaces in which knowledge is produced through filtering, zooming, temporal aggregation, and relational linking, and therefore remains explicitly contingent, updateable, and incomplete.
The paper argues that this conjunction—Exile-Image + interactive platform—reframes the yet-to-be-known not as a deficit but as a speculative and ethical horizon. It names a mode of world-making that acknowledges indeterminacy while resisting erasure, and that situates interactivity as a practice of care for fragile, displaced traces. In this sense, the yet-to-be-known becomes a critical orientation: an invitation to treat interface, trace, and testimony as forms of responsibility directed toward future accountability and renewed imaginaries of care.