RSVP below for this online event. By purchasing a ticket with donation, you directly support our programme. This online event takes place at 7pm London/Algiers. 

Radiant Matter conveys the dual sense of Enlightenment grandeur and nuclear radiation. The imperial radiance of France has left an enduring toxic legacy whose effects have not been fully measured or studied. – Jill Jarvis, Radiant Matter (p.56)

Join us online for a talk by scholar Jill Jarvis to examine the role of art and literature as a witness to trauma endured by Algerians during and after French colonisation. Jarvis’ academic research foregrounds aesthetic works as testimony of the toxic radiance that French nuclear imperialism imposed in the Sahara. Departing from Jarvis’ book Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony, the discussion will explore how art and literature rewrite history, dispute state authority to arbitrate justice, and cultivate a porous archive for imagining decolonised futures. Akin to Samia Henni’s working in our current exhibition, Jarvis’ research similarly attempts to sound what has been silenced and make visible the durational aspects of colonial violence.

This event is curated by curatorial assistant Zain Al Saie, in response to Samia Henni’s documentation of France’s secret nuclear programme in Algeria throughout the exhibition Performing Colonial Toxicity.

Jill Jarvis is an associate professor in the Department of French and a member of the councils on African Studies and Middle East Studies at Yale University. Her first book Decolonizing Memory : Algeria & the Politics of Testimony (Duke UP, 2021) charts a new itinerary for literary studies and theories of testimony, cultural memory, and decolonisation in the wake of French empire. Her work centres the aesthetic and the literary, making the case for literature as constitutive—rather than simply reflective—of political agency.

Image: Bruno Hadjih, Les Ecrans du Large, 2013