"I think it’s very important to be able to include all these voices, of the inhabitants of the Sahara,” concludes Samia Henni, a researcher and architectural historian from Algiers in a conversation with STIR on her latest project. Performing Colonial Toxicity, Henni’s exhibition at Framer Framed, an art gallery in Amsterdam examines the aftereffects of France’s nuclear program—carried out in the Algerian Sahara from 1960 to 1966—on human and non-human life in the desert. As Henni hopes to show with her ongoing research, acts carried out by the French colonial regime in the Algerian region did not dissipate with the independence of the colonised lands, but continued to affect not just the people in the region but also other forms of life and inanimate objects.

The exhibition is supported by the publication of the book Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Nuclear Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara, written by Henni and co-published by the art organisation 'If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution', Framer Framed and edition fink, Zürich; and an online database, the Testimony Translation Project; which digitises and translates over 700 pages of written and oral testimonies by French and Algerian victims of the nuclear detonation programme. The exhibition in itself brings together not just written evidence, but also spoken and felt testimonies in its plea for redress and reparation. The idea is not only to make visible the violence and toxicity of the colonisers, but to demand action, and to remember what happened.

Henni talked to STIR about Performing Colonial Toxicity (on view till January 14, 2024, at Framer Framed) and the relevance of such an exhibition today where she elaborated on the history, the spaces and the effects of the showcase.

The archives

Following her research into the French colonial occupation of Algeria and the effects of war and violence on architecture in the region (as detailed in her last book), Henni expands on the mostly redacted histories of the French nuclear programme of the '60s through this project. Her research extends to Bruno Barrillot, co-founder of the anti-nuclear NGO, Observatoire des Armements' call to the French government to declassify the documents related to the events. As Henni explains in the exhibition brochure, over the course of a few years, France detonated four atmospheric atomic bombs and 13 underground nuclear bombs, and it conducted other nuclear experiments in the Algerian Sahara. This programme occurred during and after the Algerian Revolution, or the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), with the resulting toxification spreading radioactive fallout across Algeria, North, Central and West Africa, and the Mediterranean (including southern Europe), causing irreversible and still ongoing contamination of living bodies and natural and built environments.

Weapons testing programs are more often than not carried out in desert ecosystems where the very idea of occupying and controlling the desert stems from the notion that these landscapes are virgin, empty spaces. As Henni’s previously edited volume, Deserts are Not Empty illuminates, the colonial platitude that deserts are blank canvases foregrounds the idea of extraction, toxification and destruction of these biospheres. “Even though the presence of life in desert territories might seem evident, to this day, one is repeatedly hearing and reading the same old colonial platitudes. This is because industrialised subjectivities and exploitative authorities are constantly searching for and in need of so-called “empty” places to be “filled” through occupation, extraction, mining, production, and accumulation,” she writes in the introduction.

Henni’s work with the exhibition is to expose these acts and the underlying connection of coloniality to toxicity by calling attention to the aftermath of nuclear colonialism. The exhibition and its content become even more crucial as the French government has removed information about its nuclear programme from the public eye, rendering it inaccessible even to those most viscerally impacted.

The exhibition

Towering reams of archival documents confront the visitor in the exhibition space at the gallery. The documents that Henni is working with were obtained through civic action and activism and not through formal, institutional means as would be expected for such a showcase. This becomes a point of note in questioning who controls the truth and through what means the public can access it. In defining the archive, the continental philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida see it as a system of knowledge at the centre of power. In this definition, the archive thus becomes a way for power to control truth. In the case of Algeria, the ‘absence’ of an official archive means that the researcher must rely on other forms of knowledge: the embedded toxicity in the natural landscape, witness accounts and abandoned detritus.

As she mentions in the interview, the exhibition is a way of bringing certain knowledge to the surface and showing that doing this is possible. Juxtaposing voices, images, text, film, maps, and infrastructure to call out, as a refusal to forget, statements by eight scholars, scientists, artists and activists including Larbi Benchiha, Patrice Bouveret, Roland Desbordes, Bruno Hadjih, Penelope Harvey, Gabrielle Hecht, Jill Jarvis and Roxanne Panchasi add to the discourse. Films by Larbi Benchiha and Elizabeth Leuvrey act as effective documents for the visitors, as an added layer to the written testimonies. Thus, the showcase, bringing together a multiplicity of stories and materials becomes a manifesto of architectural scale, asking its visitors to look again and consider the often invisible aspects of the toxicity of colonial acts.

Radioactive remnants

Last year, Christopher Nolan’s movie Oppenheimer presented a biographical narrative about the father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer. Of the themes the movie explores, perhaps the most pertinent is Oppenheimer’s hesitation about creating the bomb: “the destroyer of worlds”, and the dangers of the compartmentalisation of science and politics. However, the film completely glances over the devastation this weapon testing programme caused for the Navajo community living in the region. This confirms the fact that often, the narratives of indigenous communities and displaced peoples are erased in the grand scheme of history.

As environmental critic Rob Nixon argues in his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the The Poor, maintaining media attention on the temporalities of toxicity is challenging: “not only because it is spectacle deficient, but also because the fallout’s impact may range from the cellular to the transnational and (depending on the specific character of the chemical or radiological hazard) may stretch beyond the horizon of imaginable time.”

The exhibition by Henni hopes to do the opposite by showing how “the production of toxicity is embedded in the process of colonisation and mechanisms of coloniality.” For Henni, the show becomes a process of naming and making aware. It becomes a way of dealing with the consequences of what has occurred—the new world order tainted by radioactivity—by giving a voice to the voiceless.

Tap the cover video to watch the full conversation.