Op-Ed: Mediating Matters
The Dust that Binds
We share the experience of dust, the tiny unseeable particles, forgettable, yet omnipresent, substances that we move around and that perpetually move around us. Within the amalgamation of this material, carried by tradewinds and ocean currents, are the toxic particulates of coloniality. What begins as local becomes far-reaching as experienced recently in Canada with forest fires that do not adhere to international borders, jumping highways and waterways as catastrophe travels. For these reasons, materials and the implications of them matter.
The history of these roaming particulates, where they originate from and why, is also a matter of concern. Scholarship and investigation can provide historical context that may lead to redress for the communities and countries still dealing with the destructive presence of the leftover particles. Performing Colonial Toxicity, an exhibition by Dr Samia Henni, which was on view in the Lightroom Gallery at Carleton University’s Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism (ASAU) (October 23 – November 21, 2025) distills an expansive investigation of nuclear tests by the French government in Algeria into a compact, and content dense, summation of the environmental impacts. The immersive multimedia installation unfolded in the gallery like the opening of a dossier presenting documents and witnessing a history that is yet to be fully disclosed—the white cards being a hint to that. The exhibition’s intent is to “trace the spatial, atmospheric, and geological impacts of France’s atomic bombs in the Sahara, as well as its colonial vocabularies, and the (after)lives of its radioactive debris and nuclear waste.”[1]
The exhibition, which was exhibited for the first time in Canada, has been touring since 2023: Amsterdam, Netherlands at Framer Framed (2023); Zurich, Switzerland at gta Exhibitions, ETH Zurich (2024); London, England at The Mosaic Rooms (2024) among other venues. Designed to be easily transportable as well as adaptable to requirements of scale within the exhibition space, 8.5 x 11 inch sheets of standard white printer paper hang attached with binder rings held in place with metal tubes at the top and bottom. The durability of the system is reinforced by the sandwiching of two sheets of paper suspended together. The effect forms curtain-like partitions, that can be viewed from the ‘front’ or ‘back.’ Printed on the white paper are artifacts ranging from reproductions of government and military documents to handwritten victim impact statements. The typed-out translations, with the date and name of the translator, hang in proximity to the statements acting as another type of witness. Stations, set up as small architectures, support monitors screening footage of attestors. Their words appear as captions above them as they move within the black box frame of the interface.
Along with the blown-up archival images that line the top rows of the paper partitions are screencaps of videos recorded at sites in the Sahara, the playback controls still visible. On each partition, the screencaps are laid out as queued-up sequences. The timeline indicator suggests the duration of a scene moving forward in time while also providing evidence of the investigator/witness/historian’s hand in assembling corroboration to counter official narratives. Samia Henni is the scholar behind the unseen hand. She is a “historian and an exhibition maker of the built, destroyed and imagined environments.” Henni is also authour of Architecture of the Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (2017) and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (2024) as well as editor of Deserts are Not Empty (2022) and War Zones (2018). As a maker of exhibitions, along with Performing Colonial Toxicity (a co-production with Framer Framed and If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution), she has produced Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (2017-2022), Archives: Secret-Défense? (2021) and Housing Pharmacology (2020). She currently teaches at McGill University’s Peter Guo-hau Fu School of Architecture in Montreal.
This practice of exhibition making, the connection to and the installation within schools of architecture, is an imperative for Henni. “Exhibition making is also a form of research. This research should be accessible to architecture students so that they can engage with the content and use it as a kind of teaching material.” She adds, “These kinds of events or histories are not always included in architectural discourse, exhibitions, or education. I want to insist that, in addition to all the fantastic buildings that architects design, there are also histories of destruction.” As defined in the curatorial statement, “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, whose natural resources were being extracted in the process.” The heat of the blasts vitrified the rocks. “[W]hen I went around the mountain beyond Carreau 1, I saw a whole side of the mountain shining like black ice.”[2] Rock and the surrounding landscape became radioactive. Camels flocks were found dead. Those working on the nuclear experiments, including military personnel, add their voices to document the toxic impact on their bodies, afflictions like hepatocellular carcinoma (cancer of the liver). For the reader, the white paper suggests absence, hinting to what might have been left out of the edit or to the materials that remain classified in the archives. The delicateness of the serif font belies the weight of atrocities within the text.
The strategy of focusing on paper facsimiles as a proxy to the artifacts demonstrates a design approach for exhibitions on archival research. This is not new or novel but using the facsimiles to then be the construct that divides up the space into the thematic sections is a clever device. As Henni says, “this exhibition is very low-tek,” which facilitates both transportation and installation as it tours. The lightness of the design could also be understood as the antithetical statement on the burden of France’s nuclear testing in the Algerian Sahara, the physical tonnage as well as the load of intergenerational trauma yoked with massive environmental damage. As one moves around the paper ‘walls’ the generated air flow subtly shifts the paper en masse as well as imperceptibly displaces individual sheets calling to mind ‘the butterfly effect;’ in the words of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish:
The butterfly effect is invisible
The butterfly effect is always there[3]
Along with the content, the exhibition design becomes a message about the way one moves through the world, a reflection on consequence.
The exhibition and Henni’s keynote, Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara, were part of C R | P T | C’s Mediating Matter(s): Architecture + Bodily Effects symposium (October 23 – 24, 2025), organized by Dr. Federica Goffi, Dr. Menna Agha, Ahmed Elsherif, Ushma Thakrar. This event was the third edition of the triennial Agora international symposia, organized by Carleton Research | Practice of Teaching | Collaborative (ASAU, Carleton University). Founded in 2019, the collaborative pursues research in the humanities through a diverse agenda that reflects the interests of its members via the Practice of Teaching in academic architecture settings.[4] The symposium brought together the contributions of sixteen scholars (Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States) from a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The Call for Papers “asked how the mediation of matter(s) through architecture and by architects (broadly understood) normalizes certain modes of being while undermining others.”[5] The aims were twofold: “to explore how the “orderly arranging of materials and bodies” in architecture affirms the discipline’s violent legacies of exclusion, and to investigate how bodies outside dominant norms of the human disrupt these configurations through non-normative entanglements with matter.”[6] Along with Henni, other keynotes were delivered by Dr. Aya Nassar, Durham University, UK (The Elemental City: Geopoetics of the Urban in Revolutionary Flux) and Dr. María González Pendás, Cornell University, USA (Concrete Cosmologies: Bodies and Colonialities of Labour in the American Construction Site). The keynote speakers also participated in masterclasses for doctoral students.
Framer Framed, Amsterdam edition fink, Zurich.
The opening day sessions, Mnemonic Matter(s) and Particulate Matter(s), discussed dust, debris, and cement as well as the “ziggurats” of Vancouver’s yellow sulphur stockpiles from production of phosphate fertilizer to the bauxite waste in Jamaica from extraction for the production of aluminum. In her keynote which poignantly started the day, Nassar demonstrated the power of imagery to convey wicked problems. Tamir El Said’s 2016 film The Last Day of the City on Cairo and Ziad Kalthoun’s 2017 film Taste of Cement on Beirut touch on the impact of unregulated urban development on the bodies of migrant laborers as well as the atmospheric traces that move within and beyond city limits. Ali Cherri’s The Dam (2022), situated in Northern Sudan, centres on mud brick makers creating with ancient traditions set against the backdrop of the Sudanese revolution. For Cherri, the starting point is always landscapes subjected to violence as he is “interested in how violence can disseminate into the elements”[7] to become invisible particles, particularly on bodies.
On the second day, Gendered Matter(s) analyzed sites (closet, bathroom) connected to public and private constructions of self, “ergonomic” interventions in urban infrastructure, masculinity and domesticity in the history of housing in Brazil as well as the experiences of “Third World Women” in Zurich. Stratal Matter(s) focused on architecture and global capitalism at the India-Bangladesh border along with locations in Turkey, examining earth layers and extraction of the Gediz River and gold mining at Çöpler. Labour Matter(s) looked at working bodies as sites of struggle, resistance, and world-making, discussing Hong Kong streets, vernacular architecture in Angola, and experiments from the Construction Groups workshop. In the Concrete Cosmologies: Bodies and Colonialities of Labour in the American Construction Site keynote, Dr. María González Pendás examined Félix Candela’s (1920-1997) thin concrete shell construction method and how a white Hispanic elite extracted value from the labor and knowledge of Indigenous bodies in Mexico. Pendás highlighted how these bodies have been largely forgotten in architectural history, but also how construction sites allowed workers to resist extractive practices and gain long-delayed labor rights. The symposium concluded with the roundtable Mediating Matter(s), moderated by Elsherif, Thakrar, Agha, and Goffi. Both the audience and presenters participated actively bringing the two-day event to a strong and positive close.
ASAU’s Mediating Matter(s): Architecture + Bodily Effects consolidated a gathering of thoughtful scholars whose research addressed how the materials that bind together in the built environment bind us to social (in)justices.
ASAU Lightroom Gallery is open from Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
[1] Samia Henni, 2023, “Exhibiting: Performing Colonial Toxicity,” https://www.samiahenni.com/exhibits.html, accessed November 4, 2025.
[2] From exhibition: Interview with Monsieur X.Y.. 51 years old, 23 May 1994. Originally collected in 1992 by French environmental activist Solang Fernex. [LS: I think this was someone with the French military but would need to confirm with SH. Also there were 2 dates for the testimony. One may be for the translation? Also would need this confirmed.]
[3] Darwish, Mahmoud. 2009. “The butterfly effect.” In A river dies of thirst, 60. Translated by Catherine Cobham. Brooklyn: Archipelago Books.
[4] CR|PT|C, “About,” accessed October 29, 2025, Carleton Research | Practice of Teaching | Collaborative, https://www.criptic.org/
[5] Mediating Matter(s): Architecture and Bodily Affects. Agora III Symposium, Book of Abstracts, ed. Federica Goffi, Ushma Thakrar, Ahmed Elsherif, and Menna Agha (Ottawa: Carleton University, Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism, 2025), https://www.criptic.org/_files/ugd/bc659d_e22a9cde2811468d900f537634f18b09.pdf
[6] ibid.
[7] Film at Lincoln Centre (October 27, 2022). Ali Cherri on The Dam | NYFF60.
YouTube. https://youtu.be/L8THIrUryqE?si=U-hzphjIH9FUFRz3 [01:04]
Leah Snyder is an Ottawa-based digital designer and writer. Snyder writes about culture, technology and contemporary art contributing regularly to publications for the National Gallery of Canada and other Canadian art publications. She is currently enrolled in graduate studies at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University pursuing scholarship on screen architectures and immersive exhibition design.
Emiliano Ruidíaz Riffo is a Master of Architectural Studies (MAS Post-Professional) student at Carleton University, where he also serves as a Teaching Assistant. He is an architect from the Universidad de Chile (2015) and holds a postgraduate diploma in Housing and Urban Policies from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2020). His research focuses on housing and rurality, exploring alternatives to urban-centered housing models. He has been involved in architectural education and has taught design studios in Chile. He is the founder of Medio Arquitectura, a design firm based in southern Chile, specializing in timber architecture, efficiency, and sustainability.
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