In her ongoing engagement with the architectures of domination and resistance, Samia Henni maps the psychic and material afterlives of colonialism through exhibitions, writing, and pedagogy. One of her most recent projects, Psycho-Colonial Spaces, unfolds at Ar/Ge Kunst in Bolzano as a process of listening, translating, and reassembling collective memory. The following conversation took place during the closing days of the exhibition, echoing its initial questions: How can we approach colonial spatial violence—not through static narratives, but through forms that remain porous, embodied, and insistently local? Henni shares with us what emerged.
Do you see yourself as an academic?
I wear many hats. I use whatever role I need—whatever gets me where I need to go, depending on the context I'm in—so I can do the work I believe in. If I need to be an academic, I’m an academic. Sometimes I’m an architect, sometimes an artist. People call me all sorts of things, and I’m fine with any title—as long as it respects the work I do.
How would you define that work?
I try to expose the histories of what has been built, destroyed, and imagined. I don’t call it “architecture.” I think of it more as a way to engage with the traces of what humans have done on this planet: we build, we destroy, and we imagine. The imagination is a form of liberation. But the destruction—especially when tied to colonial and military practices—is a form of domination. Construction and destruction are often two sides of the same imperial coin.
I work through writing, exhibitions, teaching, and conversations. I speak with people, I connect their experiences. I try to understand and share what different communities go through. I’m lucky to speak several languages—Arabic, French, Italian, English, and some German—which helps me reach across different contexts.
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When did you begin to understand your work as holding so much responsibility?
It’s always shifting. The process evolves, depending on the urgency of the moment. Right now, the world feels upside down. Fascist regimes are rising and there’s no accountability. My work has to respond to that. I can’t keep repeating the same gestures or rehearsing what I already know. I’m in a kind of crisis, honestly. Maybe I can express it clearly here, but it isn’t so clear in reality, because the moment it becomes fixed, it can be captured and neutralized. It has to remain fluid, subversive. A disobedient practice.
Urgency is such a defining word today—used constantly, and often misused. I wonder how you navigate that saturation. Your work with language, research, and space demands presence and reflection. I’m thinking especially of your engagement with someone like Frantz Fanon, who had rare clarity about what has been urgent for centuries.
I can’t allow myself the luxury of saturation. I’m in a privileged position—I have passports that allow me to move, have a job, and a salary. So I can’t just sit back and say, what can I do? For me, saturation implies exhaustion, but also stagnation. We’re confronted with so much urgency that it becomes immobilizing. But I try to resist that.
In the exhibition, for instance, you may not see the movement—but it’s there. The scale of stagnation obscures it. That’s also part of the strategy of colonial and capitalist power: to camouflage the movement, to make us think nothing is changing. I’m thinking explicitly about Gaza and the global complicity in genocide—the erasure of international law, the psychological warfare, the surveillance of social media, the censorship by institutions and even academic donors. It’s a massive machinery of repression. But we must not stop. We must not dare to stop. Even in our exhaustion, we resist. Because we know what the machinery wants: our despair, our paralysis, our stagnation. That’s how colonialism has operated for centuries. So refusing that paralysis, insisting on solidarity—this is crucial. We must see the movement, insist it exists, and show it to others.
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That brings me to a striking contrast in the exhibition. On one side, there’s movement—research, conversation, cartography. On the other hand, there are the black canvases showing the suspended maps of former monarchies and empires. How did this form emerge?
Let me explain how I work. For example, there's a project called Performing Colonial Toxicity that was inaugurated in 2023 at Framer Framed in Amsterdam, and which is currently part of a collective exhibition at Kunstraum Kreuzberg in Berlin. That project is based on years of research. It visualizes the French nuclear weapons program in the Sahara using interviews, private documents, and site-specific materials. Other exhibitions, like Archive: Secret Défense? and Discreet Violence, also dealt with colonial and military archives. But Psychocolonial Spaces is different. When Francesca Verga invited me to Ar/Ge Kunst in Bolzano, I didn’t want to simply show finished work. The space is small, and I wanted to use it as a platform to create knowledge with the local inhabitants.
We formed discussion groups, bringing people who didn’t know each other into long, four-hour conversations around the concept of psychocolonial space. Some were hesitant, even anxious. But these turned into deep sessions where people reflected on the spaces of their own city, their bodies, their languages, and their histories. One person spoke about a relative who had served in Ethiopia. Others talked about churches, streets, and colonial memories. It was important to avoid parachuting in external content. We stayed with their experiences.
We recorded these conversations from above to maintain anonymity, and we visually documented them—printing images of the places, monuments, books, even the moments we couldn’t visually confirm. Sometimes we printed placeholders—images that resembled but didn’t fully capture what was named. It was an experimental process. I listened to the recordings over and over, and began to understand the layers: temporalities, geographies, and empires. The Roman Empire came up repeatedly—how children in Bolzano are taught to take pride in it, how it reappears in fascist narratives.
So we mapped that, starting with the Roman Empire, then the Italian fascist colonial empire in Africa. Bolzano was once Austrian, then it became Italian. The maps reflect how borders shift, how empires redraw space, how lives are disrupted. But the cartographies are fragile. They're drawn on a black, chalk-like surface—they’re erasable. Like the real-world violence of border-making they’re indifferent to geography, religion, or language.
Did that form—the fragility, the black surface—come from the conversations?
Yes. The recordings were made in February 2025, and after that, I disappeared to think about how to expose these exchanges. Even Francesca was probably worried or curious, often asking—Are you ok?! (laughs). But I needed time. I listened to every conversation again and again. I had moderated them, asked questions like where is your psychocolonial space? How is it embodied?
Eventually, I edited each recording into a 12-minute video. The first half of the discussions focuses on the self. The second half asks what message the participants want to send to visitors. The final curatorial decisions emerged from that tension. The maps, the voices, the visuals—all grew from what people shared. It was the first time I worked like this. But it made sense: to generate knowledge collectively, not just to represent it.
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Two questions in one. First: how did you select the people who came together for these conversations? And, second: did they share a connection to, or draw on, Fanon’s ideas—especially his notions of the Manichean world and/or colonial psychiatry—to engage with the spatial violence you were addressing?
Honestly, I didn’t know anyone in Bolzano beforehand except Francesca Verga (the co-curator), Verena Rastner (the executive director), and a few architects. I worked closely with Francesca and Verena. Because of the scale and nature of the space, I wanted to work with small groups of participants. Each group shared a commonality—either in terms of profession or background.
We had one group composed of psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists. Another was made up of architects, planners, and sociologists—those who work closely with the city. A third group included activists and journalists, many of whom are engaged in information work, media, and the rights of refugees and unhoused people. A fourth group consisted of young students, aged between 19 and 23, all studying in Bolzano, as well as historians, artists, and curators.
Among these participants, a few were familiar with Fanon. For example, a sociologist in the architecture and planning group. A historian in another group had read his work. But Fanon’s theories weren’t a required reference point. What mattered to me was that each group shared a language of experience so our conversations could remain grounded. I asked Francesca and Verena to suggest people in Bolzano who might fit each group—whether or not they knew them personally. We then worked to ensure the final selection was diverse and balanced, bringing in multiple experiences and perspectives.
So there wasn’t a direct or required link to Fanon?
No, but I did send participants a text about Fanon I published in 2024 in Mousse Magazine. It was more of an invitation than a prerequisite: if they had time to read it, great. If not, that was okay too. I also sent them a list of open-ended questions—questions that couldn’t be answered individually or definitively, like “What is a psycho-colonial space?” or “How does it function?”.
These questions were not meant to be answered right away but to set the tone. I made it clear that there were no fixed definitions. We’d think together. We might agree, we might not. And that was part of the point. I didn’t know at that stage what form the exhibition would take. I just knew we would document the process—with sound, photography, and video—and then shape the exhibition through post-production. We also translated the final edited pieces into German and English, so the transcriptions and audio exist in three languages.
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What insights emerged from these local conversations and experiences?
One dominant theme was language. In Bolzano, where Italian and German languages coexist, some participants described this duality as Italianization. Others called it colonization. That tension—between cultural imposition and erasure efforts—came up repeatedly.
I hadn’t expected this to be the main focus. I thought people would speak more about Italy’s colonial legacy—Libya, Eritrea, Ethiopia—the fascist regime and its afterlives. It did come up, especially among the historians and activist groups. One participant said, “It’s impossible we’re still stuck talking about ourselves through this binary—Italophones vs. Germanophones—when we should be addressing the wider colonial condition.” There was a sense that this binary distracted from broader realities and solidarities. I do understand it, and it was good to speak about it openly because it is a daily reality.
Were there any proposals that emerged—concrete or symbolic—for spatial justice or repair? For example, changing street names, creating spaces for care, or rethinking public space as a site for collective healing?
SH These ideas surfaced in different ways, depending on the group. With the students, the conversations centered around education—how the curriculum focuses on the Nazi regime but largely omits other forms of oppression, especially Italian fascism. In the German-speaking part, these histories are taught more clearly, but not so much about the colonial history and legacy of Italy.
Some participants pointed to specific injustices—like a vaccination center named after the infamous Battle of Amba Alagi, a colonial battleground. One person said, “It’s a disgrace that this name still exists in a public space. It must be changed or clearly contextualized.”
Others brought up how unhoused people and refugees are treated—how the city placed concrete blocks under bridges to prevent their use as shelter. These examples were very precise, and some participants did propose alternatives—ways to care differently, to repair. In the group of care workers and psychologists, many spoke about the exploitation of women from Eastern Europe who are employed as caregivers. There was a lot of awareness, and a real desire to claim rights and imagine better ways to address these injustices.
Will this exhibition travel, or is it always tied to a specific local context?
It would be wonderful if it could travel, especially to other parts of Italy or Austria. But if it does, my intention is not to show the same exhibition elsewhere. Rather, each iteration should be site-specific—recreated from scratch. What we did in Bolzano was Act I. I’d love to develop Act II, Act III, Act IV… If another institution invites me, I’d propose we begin the process anew: organizing groups in that place, inviting people to explore what psychocolonial spaces mean in their own city and bodies. Colonialism is not just something in the past or in faraway places—it’s here, it’s ongoing, and it shapes our daily lives.
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Samia Henni’s exhibition Psycho-Colonial Spaces is on view at Ar/Ge kunst in Bolzano until this Sunday, August 2, 2025. Her project Performing Colonial Toxicity is part of the group exhibition “Technoecologies and Bodies of Memory” at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, running until October 5, 2025.
- Images:
<p class="p1">Cover: Samia Henni, Psychocolonial Spaces—Act 1. Veduta dall’alto di uno dei workshop. Registrato da Carmine Auricchio, concepito e moderato da Samia Henni per Ar/Ge Kunst, Bolzano, Italia, febbraio 2025.</p><p class="p1">Fig.1/2/3/4 Samia Henni „Psychocolonial Spaces - Act 1, Exhibition view. Credits: ©Ar/Ge Kunst e Samia Henni, Foto Tiberio Sorvillo, 2025</p>
