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Between 1960 and 1966 the French government detonated seventeen nuclear bombs in the Algerian Sahara, irrevocably effecting the environment and the lives of the people living and working there – a secret mission that has swiftly been swept under the carpet. This is the final weekend that researcher and architectural historian Samia Henni presents her extensive research on French nuclear colonialism at Framer Framed in Amsterdam.

Based on extensive and collective research into the traumatic and unresolved nuclear history between France and Algeria, Samia Henni has compiled a public archive containing classified confidential materials on the French government’s nuclear program conducted in the Algerian Sahara between 1960 and 1966. During this secret nuclear operation, seventeen bombs were detonated, leaving destructive and irreparable traces on the lives and health conditions of the Sahara’s residents, veterans involved in the nuclear program, victims of these operations, and the overall natural environment of the region and beyond.

After visiting the exhibition several times, I arranged a conversation with Samia Henni via Zoom to talk about some exhibition aspects that to my opinion need more attention and reflection. The exhibition Performing Colonial Toxicity was developed in collaboration with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution and curated by Megan Hoetger..‘The exhibition is not really about art’, Henni explains. ‘Rather, it’s about communicating the histories of the events between 1960 and 1966, and what happened after 1966 until today. The exhibition delves into events that shape various aspects of life, such as the production and circulation of radioactivity, embedded violence, and confined spaces and remaining architectural structures associated with the French nuclear program. These narratives, which are often overlooked and under-researched, find a unique platform in exhibitions. In exhibitions, visuals and materials coalesce, engaging in a dialogue that transcends the linear structure of written text.’
Performing Colonial Toxicity indeed takes on a particular format which could be considered the result of a process of collective archiving, an approach that Henni has established over the course of her artistic practice. In the past few years, she has presented multiple historical exhibitions based on archival materials, in which she developed a method of translating text – the predominant form of documenting and transmitting information – into comprehensible exhibition formats that explore specific historical contexts. Simultaneously, these exhibitions function as historical archives and as a juxtaposition of different textual, audio, video and sound narratives. As a researcher and an academic, Henni naturally working with textual sources and produces texts herself. However, developing exhibitions enables her to bypass the limitations of traditional book formats and present archival information in radically different configurations.

In Performing Colonial Toxicity collected research material is thematically organized into thirteen stations with information printed on a hanging from the ceiling paper canvas which are composed of A4 paper sheets connected by metal rings. Each station combines illustrations, photos, text of different sizes and nature, video projections, some stations are accompanied by plasma screens with documentation of interviews which Henni conducted with researchers and physics, environmental activists and Sakhara residents, among video material are also footage of documentary makers and artists. The stations include such headings like: Justes, Atmospheric Bombs, Underground Bombs, Below Ground, Exposure, Survivors, Beryl Bomb, Jerboasite, Tan Affela, Reggane Base, etc. Via qr codes it is possible to get into the texts and audio files with testimonies of the nuclear program victims.

The exhibition serves as an associative case studies of enduring violence, legitimized by both the French and Algerian governments. As a whole, the exhibition manifests the consequences of Europe’s colonial past and the irreversible environmental damages caused by the execution of French nuclear power on living bodies and the natural landscape of the Algerian Sahara. This research project has been thoroughly documented and mediated by Framer Framed, If I Can’t Dance, and Henni herself. Aside from the physical exhibition, the project includes a podcast episode and several performance lectures. After the conclusion of the physical exhibition, the presented research materials will still be accessible on the online platform The Testimony Translation Project. Hosted on the If I Can’t Dance website, the platform features forty written and oral testimonies from French and Algerian victims of the nuclear program, translated and published for the first time. Additionally, Henni’s upcoming book, Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (2024), a comprehensive volume presenting the research materials in full detail, will be presented at the finissage of the exhibition on 14 January.

The exhibition Performing Colonial Toxicity opened in October 2023, in a time when the world’s nuclear powers are again threatening the global population. Over the last two years, since the beginning of Russia’s War on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has consistently proclaimed nuclear threats using various wordings on different occasions. This, of course, triggers fears and unrest inherited from the Cold War times. The presence of the atomic memory has been embedded in the global political DNA since the invention and detonation of the first atomic bombs 1945. Since then, visual mass culture has been inspired by the plot over and over again, as testified in films such as the recent Oppenheimer (2023, directed and written by Christopher Nolan) and earlier by the autobiographical Soviet film Take Aim (1974, directed by Igor Talankin). Both films unfold around the personal dilemmas facing the scientists who worked on the atomic weapons: Robert Oppenheimer and Igor Kurchatov, a Soviet physicist who played a central role in organizing and directing the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons.

Intersecting in this timely yet ever-relevant framework, Henni’s research project contributes largely to the knowledge about the history of European nuclear power, in which France plays a crucial role as an ambitious state that invested largely into its nuclear program – apparently without taking account of its consequences and damages.

In 2017 Henni presented a similar project, the exhibition Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria at Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, in which she investigated the spatial operations that the French army and colonial administration enforced in colonized Algeria during the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962). The exhibition consisted of texts, maps, photographs, films, and voices distributed across thirteen exhibit cases, nine flat screens, and three headsets, all of which were surrounded by a wallpaper of newspaper articles.

With Performing Colonial Toxicity, also organised into thirteen thematic stations, Henni continues to create tangible, sensual, layered and movable narratives that aim to bring into the public spotlight a chapter of French – Algerian political and environmental history. By designing her material in a layered, multidimensional and multiscaled manner, Henni aims to activate the physical and emotional potentialities of the exhibition visitors in grasping complex historical narratives. The foldable format of her exhibitions also allows them to be transported easily as a flatpack, to be unfolded in different locations. Discreet Violence, for instance, travelled to seven institutions across three continents over a period of two years. Hopefully, Performing Colonial Toxicity will have a similar showcasing intensity and wide geographical scope.