CoDES Lecture Series: Nabil Ahmed—An Image of Colonial Violence Pulled from the Air

Wednesday, November 19, 2025 at 4:30pm
Boger Hall, Room 112

Free and open to the public

An Image of Colonial Violence Pulled from the Air presents ten years of research and advocacy from the forensic investigation agency INTERPRT, based out of Trondheim, Norway. Using spatial and visual techniques from the fields of architecture and media studies, INTERPRT produces evidence for legal actions, including briefings and petitions to the International Criminal Court. The project, being released as an eBook through Library Stack is a lexicon of INTERPRT’s applied investigative practices, organized around their conceptual, legal, and methodological frameworks. The concepts section sets out the unique evidentiary challenges of representing environmental destruction. The legal terms situate the crime of ecocide and the standing of the environment within international criminal law and political theory. The methods section charts INTERPRT’s technical and computational approaches to their investigative work. Alongside firsthand descriptions and analyses are included visual materials from their first decade of investigations, providing a working toolkit for practitioners across the environmental justice movement.

Nabil Ahmed is on the faculty of architecture and design at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). With Olga Lucko, he leads the research agency INTERPRT, which utilizes architectural research, 3D reconstructions, remote sensing and publicly available datasets to investigate environmental destruction and human rights violations. INTERPRT undertakes long-term investigations on behalf of diverse groups, and pursues self-initiated research projects for which they produce advocacy videos, interactive maps and evidence files. INTERPRT collaborates with Climate Counsel, an initiative of former UN lawyers to address the climate emergency, and is a member of Investigative Commons, an initiative of Forensic Architecture. They support the global campaign to make ecocide a fifth international crime.

Co-sponsored by College of Design and Engineering Studies, College of the Environment, Samuel Silipo ’85 Distinguished Visitors Fund, Department of Art and Art History, College of Science and Technology Studies, and Center for the Arts.