Architecture as Evidence: Why the Prisons Museum Matters
- Frazer Macdonald Hay
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
By Frazer Macdonald Hay
Across the world, ordinary buildings have been made to bear extraordinary violence, schools, factories, churches, hospitals repurposed as prisons, execution grounds, torture chambers. These places do not simply fade when the conflict ends; they remain as scars in the social landscape. The Prisons Museum seeks not only to document these sites, but to protect their testimony, to transform hidden trauma into public memory, to support justice, and to give survivors narrative agency. This short reflection explains why such work matters, and why acknowledging atrocity is a foundation, not an obstacle, to peace.
Artwork by the late and wonderful Yvonne Long
There are places where violence leaves more than scars.There are sites where silence is cultivated, where whole communities live with the memory of what they witnessed, what they endured, and what they lost.And there are places where architecture itself becomes a vessel of trauma: a cell, a wall, a school, a church, a sinkhole, a hospital rooftop, each woven into narratives of cruelty, punishment, and annihilation.
For several years, I have been documenting such places, prisons, torture chambers, sniper positions, mass graves, and places of mass killing, to help support justice, accountability and, crucially, the work of memory. Today, I am glad to welcome the formation of the Prisons Museum, an initiative that recognises the profound importance of such documentation and that seeks to make this evidence accessible through both virtual and physical museum spaces.
Its mission is both simple and incredibly complex:To confront silence and impunity through truth, testimony, and memory.
Memory as Accountability
The Prisons Museum charts the architecture of repression: cell blocks and interrogation rooms, mass graves and execution walls, evidence of violence carried in concrete and brick. It offers a platform for stories that authoritarian regimes have tried to erase.
This is not simply about looking back. It is about establishing a public record that supports:
justice processes,
future accountability,
and the collective right to remember.
In Episode 8 of the LawPod by Queen’s University Belfast School of Law, Dr Amr Khito and Dr Alan Woo discuss the vision of the Prisons Museum as a place for evidence, research, education, and dignity. It is a project born from the belief that the past does not belong to perpetrators, it belongs to survivors, communities, and future generations.
My Own Work in Documenting Places of Atrocity
Between 2017 and 2018, under mandate from the United Nations International Organisation for Migration (IOM), I travelled across Iraq, interviewing survivors and witnesses and documenting sites connected to mass killings, torture, disappearances, and the everyday operations of terror.These were not abstract horrors. They were carried out in neighbourhoods, schools, churches, and industrial facilities, spaces of normal life that had been violently repurposed.
Among the sites documented were:
A neighbourhood struck by intense violence during the Battle of Mosul. Local witnesses described forced disappearances, executions, and widespread terror.
On 1 June 2017, 85 women and children were killed by ISIL sniper fire as they attempted to escape. Their bodies lay in a heap. Those still alive were pinned down as snipers continued to fire from the nearby hospital rooftop.
A tall, centrally located structure used by ISIL for public punishment and execution. Victims accused of everything from “disloyalty” to “homosexuality” were thrown from its roof. If the fall did not kill them, concrete blocks were dropped on their heads.
A Christian church desecrated and turned into a detention and trial facility for the Al Husba religious police.
An immense natural sinkhole south of Mosul. It became a dumping site for human bodies, many carried there alive.
A functioning primary school transformed into a command and propaganda centre. Local police and civil servants were gathered and executed here.
Why These Sites Matter in Peacebuilding
The implications of these places are not limited to atrocity documentation; they reveal how communities live with the memory of violence. This is the dimension of post-conflict life most overlooked by peacebuilding institutions and external actors.
To make this connection clear, the following excerpt from the executive summary of the IOM report synthesises the research findings and situates these sites within the broader question of memory and reconciliation in Iraq.
Excerpt from the IOM Executive Summary (2018)
In Iraq’s post-conflict environment, there exists a largely unrecognised social and political layer of everyday life that holds profound meaning for reconciliation and peacebuilding. My research for the International Organisation for Migration examined how memories of violence become embedded within familiar structures, schools, shops, shrines, market buildings, churches, and buildings that once supported everyday communal life but now function as vessels of trauma.
The report identified and analysed seven key sites in Mosul and Telafar, though many more remain unacknowledged. These locations were widely known not only within their local neighbourhoods but across cities and IDP camps, shared through eyewitness accounts, social media and word of mouth. The documentation showed how these places have become essential to Iraq’s post-conflict narrative: from the wall at the Pepsi factory where 84 civilians were shot as they tried to flee, to the sinkhole near Mosul where around 5,000 bodies were disposed of, still unidentified and unreturned to families.
One of the central findings of the research was the need for a national programme that archives, contextualises and validates these sites and their memories. Such an archive would support community understanding and provide a trusted, accessible fabric of memory, thereby strengthening reconciliation and informing more technocratic reconstruction efforts undertaken by government and international agencies.
The research concludes that everyday spaces imbued with trauma possess commemorative power. They hold meaning, bind communities together and should be acknowledged as part of any balanced, sustainable approach to memorialisation. Ignoring these embedded memories risks undermining peacebuilding efforts. Recognising them offers a path toward a reconciliatory present.
Why This Matters Beyond Iraq
The reflections above highlight a universal point: spaces of atrocity become carriers of memory. They are not neutral. Communities live in relation to them long after the violence has ceased. They influence identity, belonging, narrative, and even the possibility of reconciliation.
And this is not unique to Mosul or Telafar.
My work has also brought me to other places where everyday buildings were transformed into sites of horror:
The “White House” at Omarska, Bosnia and Herzegovina – a detention and torture facility during the Balkan Wars.
The “Red House” in the Philippines – a former WWII comfort station where sexual slavery was institutionalised.
The “Yellow House” in Beirut – a sniper’s nest, scarred by the Lebanese Civil War.
Architecture itself became a weapon, and then an archive.
Why the Prisons Museum Matters
The Prisons Museum represents a profound step forward because it transforms documentation into cultural infrastructure:
It makes the evidence public.
It preserves memory in forms that cannot be erased.
It supports legal and accountability processes.
It gives shape to silenced suffering.
It allows communities to reclaim narrative agency.
Museums are not neutral.They either reinforce forgetting or resist it.This one resists.
The Work Ahead
The sites I have seen are painful places. But they are also places of possibility:For research, testimony, accountability, teaching, transitional justice and healing.
The Prisons Museum is an important milestone on that path.I welcome its creation, and I am grateful to those, such as the LawPod hosts, museum founders, archivists, researchers and survivors, who keep pushing memory into the public domain.
We do not build peace by burying violence.We build peace by reckoning with it.
Places of horror, once openly acknowledged, become the foundations upon which justice is built.
If you would like to learn more about my work or discuss how architectural memory supports post-conflict recovery, please get in touch via the contact page at Uniform November.....Frazer
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