Performing Colonial Toxicity | Samia Henni

The Mosaic Rooms presents Performing Colonial Toxicity, an archival survey exhibition documenting France’s secret nuclear programme in Algeria during and after the Algerian Revolution (1954-62). This expansive research project, put together by architectural historian and exhibition maker Samia Henni, unfolds across a series of audio-visual assemblages — each consisting of maps, photographs, film, stills, documents and archival testimonies.

Between 1960 and 1966, the French colonial regime 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 programme resulted in the toxification of the Sahara, and spread radioactive fallout across Algeria, North, Central and West Africa, and the Mediterranean (including Southern Europe), causing irreversible and still ongoing contaminations of living bodies, cells and particles, as well as in the natural and built environments. The archives of the French nuclear programme remain closed over fifty years later, historical details and continuing impacts remain largely unknown.

Performing Colonial Toxicity presents available, offered, contraband and leaked materials from these archives in an immersive multimedia installation. Henni’s research straddles between oral histories and investigative reportage, bearing witness to the suppressed history of French colonial violence and its ongoing impacts in Algeria.

Samia Henni is an architectural historian, exhibition maker and educator. Working through textual and visual strategies, her practice interrogates histories of the built, destroyed and imagined environment – those produced by processes and mechanisms of colonisation, forced displacement, nuclear weapons, resource extraction and warfare.