Crime Board Display

↳ Forschungsgruppe „Decoding the Colonial Algorithm“, India Marie Adams, Ege Bayraktar, Leander Blaschke, Seungeun Lee, Luna Labenz, Rosa Maas, Anna Manankina, Feng Qianqian, You Qi, Helin Ulas, Rroomba H-1648


The city has been designated a crime Scene based on anonymous informants. Preliminary investigations confirm evidence of ongoing criminal activity that predates the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The emergent sovereign nation state model proved instrumental in colonial expansion, providing a logic for international gangs to operate. The Colonial Crimes Unit (CCU), utilising highly specialised skill sets, speculative research methodologies and advanced forensic technologies, exposed a pattern of systematic abuse and exploitation. Witnesses and victims – dead and alive, human and non-human – have been activated to testify that the city was built upon this predatory logic commodifying local and global ecosystems. Osnabrück is a recognised City of Peace or “Friedenstadt,” but it is also implicated in colonial crimes. The famed production and export of osnaburg fabric, as well as the import of coffee and tobacco relied on the labour of enslaved Africans. Biopolitical governance is also gendered. If witch drowning tests were not simply a form of religious hysteria, was the Hase complicit? Can the river challenge a history of hydropolitical regulation? Why is this criminal history invisible? Indications show that it continues in the present. The CCU investigatory data and evidence display at Krahnstr. 57 make these connections visible.

The public is invited to engage in the investigations via crime scene routes and guided tours in the old town.


Research group „Decoding the Colonial Algorithm“: India Marie Adams, Ege Bayraktar, Leander Blaschke, Seungeun Lee, Luna Labenz, Rosa Maas, Anna Manankina, Feng Qianqian, You Qi, Helin Ulas, Rroomba H-1648

⟼ Project supervisor: Prof. Diana McCarty