This video work was shot mostly in Guatemala, a country that has suffered an unusually violent history. In addition to the massacres that took place during the period of Spanish colonialist conquest, beginning in the 16th century, in the 20th century a long and cruel civil war (1960-1996) took the lives of more than 200,000 people, most of them Mayan Indians.

The Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) examines the skeletal remains of civil-war victims and the sites where they were massacred. In November 2011, a team of “Forensic Architecture”* researchers traveled to Guatemala and joined local archaeologists and anthropologists on a research expedition.

As the foreign team learned, the study of Guatemala’s geology today is inextricably connected to the investigation of the archaeology of modern genocide. In the course of this process, the material remains of modern, state-inflicted terror are unearthed alongside fragments of the ancient past, including pre-Hispanic pottery.

The years 1981-1983 were perhaps the worst two years in the course of Guatemala’s civil war. As was discovered by the FAFG, the largest number of victims killed by gunshots died during this period, which marked the height of the state’s violent repression of the civilian population. Victims whose bodies were not found were classified as missing persons in the ambiguous category of “probably dead yet legally alive” – thus allowing prosecutors and investigators to pursue related legal processes. A person’s bones bear the imprint of an entire life, and thus impart a great deal of information. From here the importance of modern forensic research, through which a considerable number of the skulls and bones of the dead have been able to reveal their horrific stories to the researchers, and through them to the world at large. The creators of this video work cite Dr. Clyde Snow, who coined the term “Ostheobiography” to express the idea of a “biography of bones.”

In traditional cabinets of wonder, human skulls served as a reminder of the imminent death that awaited all men, including the most powerful individuals. These skulls had been stripped of their individual identity, and their value lay in their representation of an absolute and general truth – that is, the inevitability of death.

By contrast, the skulls and bones found in Guatemala have regained their individual identities thanks to the modern forensic techniques that enable them to tell the world their disturbing stories. They thus bear witness to the horrible crimes that brought about their death, in some instances even presenting their cases in courts of justice.

* “Forensic Architecture” is a European Research Council Founder Project (2011-2014) hosted by the Centre for Research Architecture, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmisths University of London.

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