The fact that the consequences of colonial occupation continue to reverberate in the burning world we inherit is increasingly apparent, and not just within scholarly circles. Postcolonial theorists have long allocated accountability of planetary destruction to the long shadow of colonialism, evident in the accelerated death of ecologies, continuing extractivism and most potently, in current geopolitical tensions. Among the foremost advocates for emancipation from the pervasive atmosphere of oppression—through the lens of decolonisation—has been Frantz Fanon. The French psychiatrist and political philosopher's literary work sheds light on the inseparable role of colonial rule in how formerly colonised people identify themselves to this day. Vitally, Fanon’s acute critique centres the question of the invisible effects of the ‘us versus them’ dichotomies that undergird colonialism to this day.

Fanon argues that coloniality is inherently pathological, imposing its ways of thinking and being on the oppressed, preventing their healthy psychological development. For Fanon, “the colonial world [which] is a Manichean world” would continue extending to independent post-colonial nation states through the perpetuation of class hierarchies by the national bourgeoisie. Foregrounding the serious themes in Fanon's critical writing and activism, architectural historian Samia Henni writes in a recent essay, On Frantz Fanon and the Manichean World, that "the production of colonial spaces entails the destruction of existing spaces, and the imposition of new norms of breathing, eating, living, commuting, governing and building", extending such projections to capitalist models of globalisation. "These operations reinforce a particular world (dis)order,” she continues.

How, then, do we acknowledge and begin to unpack and critique the psychopathology of colonialism, dispossession, oppression and violence entrenched in the contemporary world? How do we map the effects of what is and remains otherwise unseen? Henni builds on this crucial unearthing in a project commissioned by Ar/Ge Kunst, Bolzano, which explores how borders, territories and inhabited places impose themselves on people's lives; tracing the “invisibilised spaces of segregation and alienation across the territory of Bolzano and its surroundings [through] colonial traces, monuments and streets”, as stated in the official release. The project, Psychocolonial Spaces, attempts to bring conversations about oppression and segregation—that may or may not be directly felt—to light by inviting urban residents from Bolzano to participate in a series of workshops that trace the history and experience of the city’s localities. For the first event (Act 1) specific to Bolzano, the curator invited six different groups of six people each, including artists, historians, urban planners, architects and designers to relay their lived experiences and speak about the systems that they believe control how they move in urban landscapes and built environments.

The outcome of the workshops is currently being displayed in an exhibition at Ar/Ge Kunst till August 2, 2025. "The idea was to think about the psychological impact of colonialism in the present [through the] daily life of people living in cities," Henni shares in conversation with STIR on the occasion of the show's opening. By underpinning Fanon's thesis on the continuing pathological impacts of oppressive regimes, Henni unravels "the relationship between the psychological and the physical aspects of colonialism in physical spaces and through the bodies, of course, of people living in these spaces". What's worth noting about the showcase is especially the attempt at understanding the more invisible effects of colonial violence on territories and how it might continue to impact society today and manifest itself through aspects of urbanisation, gentrification, renewal and social exclusion. Henni's curatorial motivations seem to stem from this resolve – to reveal what has so far been largely unseen.

Similar to her previous curatorial project, Performing Colonial Toxicity, which studied the ‘absent’ archives of France's nuclear program carried out in the Algerian Sahara from 1960 to 1966 and its deleterious effects on human and non-human life, her attempt here is to spotlight the contentious fact that we still live in a world dictated by colonial mechanisms. With the project in Italy, Henni hopes to ratify this claim, as she notes, "not through my own work and not through my own representation or projection of these convictions, but to try to do it through people living in the cities". By shifting the focus from dispassionate data, silent archives or pure information, Henni also seems to move away from methods of recording that are based on colonial precedents.

For the exhibition in the Bolzano-based institute, Henni, along with the curators Francesca Verga and Zasha Colah, brings together the experiential aspects of spatialities by presenting the recorded workshops through video installations, divided into six segments. The immersive design of the space includes six sections for the videos, audios of Fanon’s texts playing on loop, transcripts of the workshops for perusal and maps from different parts of the city/territory that were discussed. The different interlocutors paint a fragmented image of Italy that visitors can begin to fill in with their own stories. For instance, in conversation, Verga notes the relevance of the set-up and how it hopes to bring to light the history of Bolzano. The workshops, which were moderated by Henni, included prompts that led to the participants speaking about remnants of colonisation in neighbourhoods, streets and through urban markers like statues; some even identified the ‘psycho-colonial’ space as their own bodies, a marker of the pervasiveness of such systems.

The affective act of countermapping that the exhibition posits begins to piece together an image of the region that was not a part of Italy before the First World War, hence expanding on how oppression and segregation unfold in the sociopolitical realm. It could be read as a critique of maps as self-evident representations of nationalities. The embodied effects of structural violence—racism, segregation, hierarchisation—are a means for Henni to draw a clear thread from what is considered the past to the violent present.

To return to Fanon, it is his focus on individual psychoses, and his insistence that colonial apparatuses prolong these, that Henni insists we must think with to overcome our current situations. “[Fanon] does connect capitalism or economic processes with colonial processes…For me, the way that he analysed these syndromes and the causes is very much about the experiences we are still living in, the experiences that are really related to labour dynamics, capitalist dynamics, exploitation, extraction, environmental extraction too,” she notes.

As Henni's larger body of research and this exhibition make clear, language, hierarchies, divisions persist in ways that we cannot fully realise. In such conditions, can we claim to ever have been post-colonial?