Rehearsing Colonial Toxicity
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Samia Henni is a historian, and an exhibition maker of the built, destroyed, and imagined environments. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (gta Verlag 2017, 2022, EN; Editions B42, 2019, FR), and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (If I Can’t Dance, Framer Framed, edition fink, 2024, 2025, EN; Editions B42, 2025, FR), and the editor of Deserts Are Not Empty (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022, 2025, EN; LetteraVentidue Edizioni, 2024, IT) and War Zones (gta Verlag, 2018). She is also the maker of exhibitions, such as Psychocolonial Spaces (ArGe Kunst, Bolzano, 2025–), Performing Colonial Toxicity (Amsterdam, Zurich, London, Paris, Berlin, Ottawa, Montreal, 2023–), Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, Charlottesville, 2017–22), Archives: Secret-Défense? (ifa Gallery, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2021), and Housing Pharmacology (Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020). Currently, she teaches at McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture in Montreal.
As part of Dark Opacities Lab’s 2024-2026 theme, “Nazar: A Theory of the Evil Eye,” we will be hosting a speaker series to consider questions central to intellectual, political, and ethical questions integral to the context of global struggles for liberation and indigenous sovereignty. For the purposes of developing an anti-colonial theory of sight, we offer Nazar as a framework in which to triangulate race, colonialism, and psychoanalysis. We ask: What might it mean to think about surveillance and racist technology using Nazar as an animating framework? If we understand the harm caused by sight as surveillance, oversight, or violent watching, what might it mean to reconsider it as a protective or healing power, necessary and potentially having its own kind of magic?
Please join us for our second event with historian, curator, and scholar of the built environment, Samia Henni. Henni is an assistant professor in the Peter Guo-Hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University. She will present work related to her book, Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (If I Can’t Dance, Framer Framed, edition fink, 2024).
For those out of town or can’t make it in person, this event will be livestreamed, and the zoom link will be made available soon.
