Samia Henni

Colonial Toxicity

16 October 2025

Lecture at annual sculpture symposium: Red threads, loose ends, another sculpture IS possible

Samia Henni is a historian and an exhibition maker of the built, destroyed and imagined environments and their relationship with the practices of colonization, war, and environmental contamination. Her most recent research has culminated in the exhibitions Psychocolonial Spaces (2025–; Bolzano), Performing Colonial Toxicity (2023–; Amsterdam, Zurich, London, Providence, Paris, Berlin, Ottawa), Housing Pharmacology (2020–21; Marseille, Paris), Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (2017–2022; Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca and Philadelphia), as well as in the books Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (EN, 2024, 2025; FR, 2025), and Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (EN, 2017, 2022; FR, 2019); and the volumes Deserts Are Not Empty (EN, 2022, 2025; IT, 2024) and War Zones (2018) of which she was the editor. She received her PhD in the history and theory of architecture (with distinction, ETH Medal) from ETH Zurich and has taught at Princeton University, ETH Zurich, Geneva University of Art and Design, The University of Zurich, and Cornell University. Currently, she teaches at McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture.