Amsterdam-based gallery Framer Framed presents the exhibition Performing Colonial Toxicity by researcher and architectural historian Samia Henni, in collaboration with If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. The project highlights the expurgated history of French nuclear colonialism in the Algerian Sahara and draws attention to the urgency of taking into account this history and its lived environmental and sociopolitical impacts.
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, from which natural resources were thus extracted. This secret nuclear weapons program took place during and after the Algerian Revolution, or Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). The resulting toxicity from the Sahara spread radioactive fallout across Algeria, North Africa, Central and West Africa, and the Mediterranean (including Southern Europe), causing irreversible contamination and still of living bodies, cells and particles, as well as the natural and built environment. environments. Because the archives of the French nuclear program remain closed more than fifty years later, the historical details and ongoing impacts remain largely unknown.
The exhibition emerges from a broader research project, which also includes the publication Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (2024) and an open access digital database entitled The Testimony Translation Project.
The Performing Colonial Toxicity exhibition presents available, donated, smuggled, and leaked materials from this archive in an immersive multimedia installation. With them, he creates a series of audiovisual assemblages which trace the spatial, atmospheric and geological impacts of the French atomic bombs in the Sahara, as well as its colonial vocabularies and the (after)life of its radioactive debris and nuclear waste. . Taking on an architectural dimension, these "stations", as Henni calls them, are intended to be crossed and interacted with. Visitors are invited to make their own connections between what is present in the installation and what is absent.
Experimenting with different methods of spatialization and circulation of deleted information, the three-part structure of the project constitutes a powerful call to action to open the still classified archives and clean/decontaminate the sites: two crucial steps to expose the past, the present and the future of colonial toxicity.
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