Colonial Toxicity

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Please note that access will not be permitted 15 minutes after the start of the event. This event will be held in English. To be notified of upcoming Institute for Ideas and Imagination events, we invite you to sign up for our monthly newsletter .

Samia Henni will present her latest research on the French nuclear weapons program in the Algerian Sahara. Between 1960 and 1966, the French colonial authorities 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). In her research, Henni brings together nearly six hundred pages of materials documenting France's nuclear history in the Algerian desert.

Meticulously culled together from across available, offered, and leaked sources, she will discuss a rich repository 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.

Her research resulted in three outcomes: a series of translations of testimonies of nuclear victims, a traveling exhibition Performing Colonial Toxicity , and a published book, titled Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara .

Henni's presentation will be followed by a roundtable moderated by Ralph Ghoche . Roundtable participants: Samia Henni is a historian of the built, destroyed, and imagined environments. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Architectu re 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), and the editor of Deserts Are Not Empty (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022, 2024) 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, 2023–04), 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.

Ivana Nikolić Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Chemistry and Director of Frontiers of Science, a core science course for…