SAMIA HENNI. PSYCHOCOLONIAL SPACES - ACT 1

Psychocolonial Spaces: Act 1 is a project conceived and implemented by Samia Henni, and commissioned by Ar/Ge Kunst, to be held in Bolzano between 24 May and 2 August 2025. The project investigates the relationships between borders, territories and inhabited spaces, and Frantz Fanon’s (1925-1961) analysis of the psychology of colonialism.
The project for Ar/Ge Kunst, Psychocolonial Spaces, is the first of a series of events that may be activated in various cities and places. Act 1 sets out from the analysis of the invisible and invisibilized spaces of segregation and alienation across the territory of Bolzano and its surroundings: colonial traces, monuments and streets, places that even today have an impact on people’s lives. But what comes to mind when we think of ‘psychocolonial’ spaces? How do they affect us and how do we recognize them? How does our body absorb the violence of these spaces and how do our education, origins and attitude change the way we think about these places? What emerges when we deviate from binary systems of thought and organization?
Samia Henni (1980, DZ/CH) is a writer, 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 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.
This project is made possible with the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.