1000 Villages program: Archival Futures. Samia Henni in conversation with Massinissa Selmani

Join this online presentation and conversation with Samia Henni and Massinissa Selmani, with the participation of Natasha Marie Llorens using the next link:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87074878648

Samia Henni will present her archival exhibition project Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria. Her presentation will be followed by a discussion with Massinissa Selmani, moderated by Natasha Marie Llorens, about the methodological choice to work with archives and the hisorical link between various settlement policies in Algeria both during and after the War of Liberation.

The period of the Algerian War of Liberation (1954-1962) saw a profound reorganization by the French civil and military authorities of Algeria’s urban and rural territory. New infrastructure was implemented very rapidly and housing was built apace with the ultimate aim of maintaining French rule in Algeria. Samia Henni’s exhibition, Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria, focused on camps built by the military in rural parts of the country during this time. The military goal of what were camps ‘regroupment camps’ was to move people out of their traditional villages, weaken the significant ties between the rural population and the Algerian armed resistance fighters, and cut the lines of material and psychological support to the latter. Henni’s exhibition included French military photographs, films produced by the the Service cinématographique des armées (SCA), and other archival sources. It also discloses how the French colonial regime explained away the camps’ military purpose following a media scandal about them in 1959.

Drawing on Discrete Violence as a case study, Henni and Selmani will speak to the methodological choice to present archival materials in exhibitions in terms of aesthetic choice and audience engagement. Henni will also trace some the historical context that extends beyond the regroupment camps to a urban planning project initiated by the French—also named the 1000 Villages—to the socialist villages project that forms the kernel of Selmani’s own project at Index.

Samia Henni is a historian and an exhibition maker of the built, destroyed and imagined environments. She is the author of Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (2017, 2022, EN; 2019, FR) and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (2024). She is the editor of Deserts Are Not Empty (2022) and War Zones (2018). She is also the maker of exhibitions, such as Performing Colonial Toxicity (Framer Framed, If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam; gta Exhibitions, Zurich; The Mosaic Rooms, London, 2023–04), 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).