Speaker: Samia Henni, Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University
Respondent: Alexandre Mecattaf, COLLECTIVE Studio
Moderator: Daniel Elam, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: On Zoom
In the 1960s the French colonial regime detonated four atmospheric atomic bombs, thirteen underground nuclear bombs, and conducted other nuclear experiments in the Algerian Sahara. This secret, still-classified programme, which occurred during and after the Algerian War (1954–1962), is the subject of architectural historian Samia Henni’s recent monograph Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara. Meticulously culled together from numerous sources, the publication‘s wealth of materials documenting the violent history of France’s activities in the Algerian desert offers 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.
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) 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, 2023–25),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 in Montreal.
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