Lecture by Samia Henni

e-flux Architecture presents “Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara,” a lecture by Samia Henni at e-flux on Monday, March 25 at 7pm.

This lecture discusses the making of Samia Henni’s publication Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (2024), which brings together nearly six hundred pages of materials documenting the violent history of France’s nuclear bomb program in the Algerian desert. Meticulously culled from across available, offered, contraband, and leaked sources, the book is a rich repository for all those concerned with spatial histories of nuclear weapons and engaged at the intersections of spatial, social, and environmental justice, as well as anticolonial archival practices.

“Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara” is presented as part of e-flux Architecture Lectures, a monthly series inviting researchers and practitioners to discuss timely issues in contemporary architecture, theory, culture, and technology.

Samia Henni is a historian of built, destroyed, and imagined environments. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (EN, 2017; FR, 2019) and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (2024); the editor of Deserts Are Not Empty (2022) and War Zones (2018); and the maker of exhibitions such as Performing Colonial Toxicity (2023–24), Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (2017–22), Archives: Secret-Défense? (2021), and Housing Pharmacology (2020). She has taught at Princeton university, Geneva University of Art and Design, and Cornell University among other places. Currently, she is a Visiting Professor at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich, and the co-chair of the University Seminar “Beyond France” at Columbia University. In the fall of 2024, Henni will join the faculty of McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture in Montreal.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility                    
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.         
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program [​at​] e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.                  
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.