TITLE
Exhibiting Colonial Toxicity
Between 1960 and 1966, the French colonial regime detonated four atmospheric atomic bombs, thirteen underground nuclear bombs, and conducted other nuclear experiments in the Algerian Sahara, whose natural resources were being extracted in the process. This secret nuclear weapons program, whose archives are still classified, occurred during and after the Algerian Revolution, or the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). This lecture introduces three media through which these histories and stories have been exposed: a series of translations, a traveling exhibition and a book. On the one hand, the exhibition Performing Colonial Toxicity documents unfolds across a series of audio-visual assemblages — each consisting of maps, photographs, film, stills, documents and archival testimonies. On the other hand, the book Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara brings together nearly six hundred pages of materials documenting this violent history of France’s nuclear bomb program in the Algerian desert. Meticulously culled together from across available, offered, contraband, and leaked sources, the exhibition and book are rich repositories for all those concerned with histories of nuclear weapons and engaged at the intersections of spatial, social and environmental justice, as well as anticolonial archival practices.
Samia Henni is a historian and an exhibition maker of the built, destroyed and imagined environments. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (gta Verlag 2017, 2022, EN; Editions B42, 2019, FR) and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (If I Can’t Dance, Framer Framed, edition fink, 2024). She is the editor of Deserts Are Not Empty (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022) and War Zones (gta Verlag, 2018). She is also the maker of exhibitions, such as Performing Colonial Toxicity (Framer Framed, If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam; gta Exhibitions, Zurich; The Mosaic Rooms, London, Brown University, Providence, 2023–25), Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, Charlottesville, 2017–22), Archives: Secret-Défense? (ifa Gallery, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2021), and Housing Pharmacology (Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020). Currently, she teaches at McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture in Montreal and co-chairs the University Seminar “Beyond France” at Columbia University.