Mapping Atrocity

“I’m an architect, and I now increasingly refer to myself as a journalist as well” said Alison Killing, speaking virtually at the University at Buffalo Wednesday night. As the first architect to win a Pulitzer, this label isn’t unfounded. Her talk, Investigating Xinjiang’s Network of Detention Camps, focused on the methods she and her co-awardees developed for investigating human rights abuses perpetuated by the Chinese state against Turkic Muslims. The research, published on BuzzFeed, used satellite imagery and analytical techniques familiar to architectural practice to locate and identify almost 300 camps in the province of Xinjiang. “I brought a lot of experience to the table in this because of my architectural background, [and] how I used mapping and imagery to [previously] work on migration,” said Killing.

Questions around the transmission, censorship, and authenticity of information were at the heart of the matter from the very beginning. Censored satellite imagery on Baidu was paired against uncensored images on other platforms. Contemporary images were compared with historical ones, showing the history of the camps’ construction. Acquired government documents stating regulations for detainment facilities were used to determine occupancy and program types. Interviews with former detainees corroborated locations and spatial characteristics inside. While a comparison to the work of Forensic Architecture might be apt, Killing’s journalistic approach and focus is distinctive and was central to the project: “I think what’s powerful about what we were able to do is that we have provided rigorous evidence of the scale of this detention program, showing where it is, doing this work to calculate the capacity [of the camps]…but also tell the human stories that show what the impact of this is on a human level. I think that is a very powerful way of telling people what is happening and why it is important.”