Documenting Colonial Toxicity: Public Lecture by Samia Henni

Event Description

The UTS School of Architecture is delighted to welcome international guest lecturer Samia Henni for a public talk on her recent research into the French nuclear weapons testing programme (1960–1966) in the Algerian Sahara.

This work has materialised in three interconnected outcomes: translations of testimonies by nuclear victims; the traveling exhibition Performing Colonial Toxicity; and the publication Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara. Presented by Framer Framed in collaboration with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, the exhibition is an immersive multimedia installation organised into a series of traversable stations. Each presents an assemblage of audio-visual and textile-like materials that trace the spatial, atmospheric, and geological impacts of France’s atomic bombs in the Sahara—alongside the colonial vocabularies and (after)lives of radioactive debris and waste. The accompanying book, a six-hundred-page repository of archival and leaked materials, documents this violent history and its enduring legacies.

The talk explores the modes of documenting and disseminating French colonial toxicity in the Sahara and elsewhere.

This event forms part of the UTS School of Architecture’s Solidarity public program, curated by Dr Endriana Audisho.

Biography

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.

Banner Image: Spread from Colonial Toxicity by Samia Henni, published by Edition Fink, 2025.