When you think of architecture and opera, you think of opera houses where classical pieces are performed. Australian composer Ben Frost (42) combines architecture and music theater in a completely different way: for a new production commissioned by the State Theater in Hanover, to be shown next week during the Holland Festival, he was inspired by work by the London agency Forensic. Architecture.
Founded in 2010 by Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture is not a traditional architectural firm that designs buildings; it operates at the intersection of architecture and forensics. With their reconstructions of crime scenes, which they make on their own initiative and on commission, they want to create insight and uncover the truth.
Frost became acquainted with the agency in 2015 when he was on Lesvos to document the refugee crisis with artist Richard Mosse. Forensic Architecture used Frost’s film work as part of the evidence in a shipwreck case in which 43 refugees drowned. “I admire the way Forensic Architecture works: from a human perspective, speaking for those who have a weaker voice or no voice,” says Frost. ‘Their unique skills are not always understood by the general public; many people think architecture is all about making fancy houses.’
Frost got the idea to do a piece about their work, and soon came up with their video reconstruction of the murder of Halit Yozgat in Kassel (not far from Hanover). On April 6, 2006, 21-year-old Yozgat was shot twice in the head in broad daylight in his own internet cafe. It was the ninth of ten racially motivated murders committed between 2000 and 2007 by the neo-Nazi Nationalsozialistischeer Untergrund (NSU).
On the day of the attack, undercover agent Andreas Temme had been sitting in the back of the internet cafe. He said he hadn’t heard or seen anything, and may have left earlier. The court accepted his testimony, but from the counter-investigation that Forensic Architecture began, it became clear that Temme must have been in the store at the time of the murder. ‘The story lent itself to theatre, precisely because the case is largely about sound, and how it behaves in space,’ says Frost.
When asked what his opera adds to the work of Forensic Architecture, he answers that the video reconstruction ‘doesn’t come into its own if you watch the film on YouTube or in an art gallery’. ‘After all, the sound is then played through a speaker or headphones, the image is shrunk to a small frame. In the theater you can use the physical space. I knew immediately: I’m going to put a speaker on stage to reproduce the sound exactly as it is documented, two meters away from the man who said he hadn’t heard anything.’ When you hear the bangs in the opera, it seems impossible.
The people at Forensic Architecture made all their material available to Frost, but were not creatively involved in the realization of the opera. Frost: ‘I understand that it is important for Forensic Architecture to keep an appropriate distance from the art world, to maintain their authority in the field of research. But we share a mutual respect.’
The decor is a bright white one-to-one scale model of the internet café, built on a printed floor plan, with the doors moving exactly as in real life. The timeline that Forensic Architecture constructed on the basis of mobile data and the testimonials of the five people who were present in the 77 square meter internet cafe, Frost has worked out per character in song lines and movements. The opera is set up as a kind of canon, with the story repeating itself seven times over two hours, and the actors playing all roles once.
With his opera the composer wants to create an ’empathic space’ in which the spectator can move; disconnecting characters from a particular actor makes that easier. The neutral decor, in which the interior has been omitted, suggests that this place can be anywhere.
†The Murder of Halit Yozgat is about Halit’s death, but rather than dismiss it or target him, I suggest that this cafe and the crime that took place there is a microcosm within a larger system of violence.’ According to Frost, the question is not who pulled the trigger, but: who knew what was about to happen, who helped make it possible, who protected Halit against a group of terrorists? “The real violence lies in the protection of Agent Temme by the German state.”
The ministry decided that the investigative report into the role of Temme and the intelligence service in this case should not be made public for 120 years; Halit’s father, who found his son dead in the cafe, will never be able to reach it. Frost: ‘Time is used as a weapon against the victims. That should not happen in a functioning democracy. By highlighting that, stretching the time, I want to force the public to see the ‘architecture’ behind this story.’
The Murder of Halit Yozgat15 and 16 June, Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam.