School's Out! #51 with Samia Henni
School's Out! #51 with historian and exhibition maker Samia Henni. A lecture about the built and destroyed environments, dealing with questions of colonization, nuclear weapons, and deserts. Followed by a short film, drinks and tunes. Friday 30 May 2025, 19:00 - 22:00.
School’s Out! #51 - Samia Henni
Every last Friday of the month the Independent School for the City celebrates the start of the weekend with a public lecture. For this edition we've invited historian and writer Samia Henni to present her latest research on the French nuclear weapons testing programme (1960–1966) in the Algerian Sahara.
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 programme, 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 this violent history of France’s nuclear bomb programme in the Algerian desert. Meticulously culled together from across available, offered, contraband, and leaked sources, she will present 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.
Henni's 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.
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
Samia Henni is a historian of the built, destroyed and imagined environments. She is the author of Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria which received the 2020 Spiro Kostof Book Award, and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara. She is the editor of Deserts Are Not Empty and War Zones, and the maker of exhibitions, such as Performing Colonial Toxicity, Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria, Archives: Secret-Défense?, and Housing Pharmacology.