Environmental Humanities Center Amsterdam

Colonial Toxicity: Forms of Publicness

Samia Henni

Monday 27 November, 18.00hrs
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Main Building, Auditorium (HG-1C 07)

From 8 October 2023 to 14 January 2024, Framer Framed presents the exhibition Performing Colonial Toxicity by Samia Henni, in collaboration with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. The project sheds light on the redacted history of French nuclear colonialism in the Algerian Sahara and draws attention to the urgency of reckoning with this history and its lived environmental and sociopolitical impacts. The exhibition emerges from a broader research project, which also includes the publication Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Nuclear Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara and an open access digital database entitled The Testimony Translation Project. Experimenting with different methods of spatialising and circulating suppressed information, the project’s three-part structure constitutes a call to open the still-classified archives and clean/decontaminate the sites: both crucial steps for exposing the pasts, presents and futures of colonial toxicity. This talk presents the context of colonial toxicity and discusses its on-going forms of publicness.

Please note that Samia is also going to be presenting at the Framer Framed exhibition on Sunday afternoon, November 26 https://framerframed.nl/en/projecten/performance-lecture-by-samia-henni/

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, 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, 2023), and 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, 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). Her teaching and research interests, as well as her exhibitions, are centered around the intersection of architecture with questions of colonialization, displacement, gender, resource extraction, and wars. Samia received her PhD in the history and theory of architecture (with distinction, ETH Medal) from ETH Zurich and has taught at Cornell University, Princeton University, ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, and Geneva University of Art and Design. Currently, she is an invited Visiting Professor at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich, and the co-chair of the University Seminar “Beyond France” at Columbia University. In the fall of 2024, Samia will join the faculty of McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture in Montreal. 

EHC Environmental Justice Series

This lecture is part of a three-part series on Environmental Justice at the Environmental Humanities Center Amsterdam, which featured Emily Eliza Scott on Environmental Justice and Contemporary Art and which will also include a lecture by Ola Hassanain on 11 December, 18:00hrs.

Photos Caption

Photo by Maarten Nauw, Framer Framed, 2023