Lecture - Including Wars and Deserts: Diversifying Architecture

In her lecture, Samia Henni will discuss the making and purposes of two published edited volumes, Wars Zones (Zurich: gta Verlag, 2018) and Deserts Are Not Empty (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022), and the traveling exhibition Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French Army in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, Charlottesville, 2017–22). The lecture is a demonstration of intersectional thinking and making, which challenges the isolation of social categorizations such as race, gender, class, religion, age, sexual orientation, and so on.

This lecture is given in the context of the joker week 2023 ‘Regard’ of Department Architecture of UGent.

BIO:

Samia Henni is a historian of the built, destroyed and imagined environments. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (gta Verlag 2017, EN; Editions B42, 2019, FR), which received the 2020 Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians; the editor of Deserts Are Not Empty (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022) and War Zones (gta Verlag, 2018). She is also the maker of exhibitions, such as Archives: Secret-Défense? (ifa Gallery, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2021), Housing Pharmacology (Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020) and Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, Charlottesville, 2017–22). She was Albert Hirschman Chair (2020-21) at the Institute of Advanced Study in Marseille, and a Geddes Fellow (2021) at Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Samia is a member of various boards, including the Board of Directors at the Society of Architectural Historians and the Academic Board of the African Futures Institute. Currently, she teaches at Cornell University, and is working on an exhibition and a book project on the lives and afterlives of France’s nuclear weapons program and wastes in the Sahara, which will be presented in Amsterdam in October 2023.

When

Tuesday 28^th of March 2023 from 18:00-19:30

Where

Geeraard de Duivelsteen, Geraard de Duivelstraat 1, 9000 Gent

For whom

Accessible for everyone inside and outside UGent.

Contact

Eef Boeckx (Eef.Boeckx@ugent.be) & Kris Coremans (Kris.Coremans@ugent.be), Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Faculty of Engineering and Architecture