School's Out! #51 with Samia Henni

School’s Out! #51 - Samia Henni

Samia Henni will present her latest reasearch on the French nuclear weapons testing programme (1960–1966) in the Algerian Sahara, which unfolded 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. On the one hand, the exhibition was presented by Framer Framed, in collaboration with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. It is an immersive multimedia installation organised into a series of stations meant to be traversed and engaged by bodies. Each station presents an assemblage of materials spanning audio-visual and textile-like displays, which trace and name the spatial, atmospheric, and geological impacts of France’s atomic bombs in the Sahara, as well as its colonial classification vocabularies, and the (after)lives of its radioactive debris and nuclear wastes. On the other hand, the printed manuscript brings together nearly six hundred pages of materials documenting this violent history of France’s nuclear bomb programme in the Algerian desert. Meticulously culled together from across available, offered, contraband, and leaked sources, the book is 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. The talk explores the modes of documenting and disseminating French colonial toxicity in the Sahara and elsewhere.

Samia Henni is a historian 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), which received the 2020 Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians, 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, 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). She received her PhD in the history and theory of architecture (with distinction, ETH Medal) from ETH Zurich and has taught at Princeton university, ETH Zurich, Geneva University of Art and Design, and Cornell University. Samia was an invited tutor (June–July 2023) at the first-ever Biennale College Architettura 2023 at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition at Venice Architecture Biennale, the inaugural Albert Hirschman Chair (2020–21) at the Institute of Advanced Study in Marseille, a Geddes Fellow (2021) at Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, a member (2020–23) of the Board of Directors of the Society of Architectural Historians, a Visiting Professor at the Institute for the History of Art at the University of Zurich (2020) and the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich (2023–24). 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.

Programme

18:00 Doors open, drinks bites and tunes

19:00 - 20:15 Presentation by Samia Henni + Q&A

20:15 - 20:30 Short film, selected by Jord Den Hollander

20:30 - 22:00 Drinks and tunes