Colonial Toxicity

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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 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), 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 Columbia College. Additionally, she serves as President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, an organization that educates and advocates for a world free of nuclear weapons. Hughes holds a BS with Honors from Caltech, where she studied chemical engineering and completed her Senior Thesis with Prof. Frances Arnold. She obtained her PhD from Stanford University, where she was an American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellow, working in the laboratory of Prof. Dan Herschlag. She has been a faculty member at Columbia University since 2008 and was awarded the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award for 2020. Her work on ascertaining the radiological conditions in the Marshall Islands, the site of US nuclear testing, has been covered widely. Hughes currently serves as a member of the Scientific Advisory Group to the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. In addition to her scholarly writing, she has published in The Nation, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Hill, Scientific American, Truthout, Common Dreams, Transcend Media Service, The Diplomat, and elsewhere.

Patricia Falguières is a professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. Her work primarily focuses on Renaissance philosophy and art, as well as their classification, encyclopedias, indexes, and the emergence of the museum in early modern Europe. She is also active in the field of contemporary art through articles and essays, as well as monographic publications on conceptual art and the relationship between art and theatre in the 20th century.

Ralph Ghoche is a historian of 19th-century architecture and urbanism. His current research looks at the territorial interventions of the Catholic Church in Colonial Algeria in the 19th century. It examines how the Church reshaped urban space in Algiers through the construction, conversion, and erasure of buildings in order to advance its aim of resurrecting Augustinian Christendom in North Africa. The topic is explored in “Erasing the Ketchaoua Mosque: Catholicism, Assimilation and Civic Identity in France and Algeria,” in Neocolonialism and Built Heritage, edited by Daniel Coslett and series editor, Anthony D. King. Ghoche has also written widely on French architecture and its relationship to theories of ornament, archeology and aesthetics in the 19th century. His book-length study of these themes will be published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2020.

This conversation is organized by Ralph Ghoche, architectural historian at Barnard College and 2019-20 Fellow, on the occasion of the opening of Samia’s exhibition Performer la toxicité coloniale, at Avril Bastille on November 19 at 7 p.m.

This event will be recorded and may be broadcast as part of our podcast series. By participating and asking questions, you consent to the use of your voice in this context.