For the third event in the context of the Hostile Environment(s) expanded platform we will be reflecting on the violence perpetrated by colonial institutions and on the role of gardening as a form of healing. We will do this by considering anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon and his experience of the psychiatric hospital of Blida-Joinville in Algeria. The screening of the film The Whispering of Ghosts by artist Mohamed Bourouissa will be followed by a talk by architect and researcher Samia Henni. This will serve as an entry point for a conversation connecting history to the present and touching upon issues of liberation though care, gardening, architecture, counter revolution and memory.

PROGRAMME

Screening of Mohamed Bourouissa’s
The Whispering of Ghosts, 2018, 13 min.

The Whispering of Ghosts is based on the psychiatric hospital in Blida, Algeria, where psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon worked as a doctor from 1953 to 1956 and where he first became aware of the structural problems with the psychiatric treatments offered to Algerian patients during the French colonial era. The film delves into the story of one of Fanon’s former patients, Bourlem Mohamed, who took up gardening as a form of occupational therapy and gave expression to the organisation of his mental space in the structure of the garden. The film is edited in an erratic fashion that follows Bourlem Mohamed’s trains of thought, jumping from his own memories of being a Fellagha (a freedom fighter in the anti-colonial Algerian War) to the planting and nurturing of the garden he created at the hospital in 1969. Gardening was one area in which Frantz Fanon hoped to end the segregation and separation of colonial and indigenous patients. Blida is also Mohamed Bourouissa’s hometown; his investigation of the hospital turns out to be an investigation of his own roots.

Talk by Samia Henni
Spaces of Alienation and Freedom: Frantz Fanon and the Algerian Revolution 

During the Algerian Revolution, which is also known as the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), psychiatrist and anticolonial activist and writer Frantz Fanon played a crucial role treating agonising psychological conditions on both sides of the armed conflict: at the psychiatric hospital of Blida-Joinville he treated Algerians who had been subjected to severe torture as well as French officers who had been torturing Algerians. In 1956, after three years of gruelling work in Algeria, Fanon resigned from his position because it had become clear to him that it was the French colonial regime that was producing and perpetuating the mental distress that he witnessed, and he did not believe that colonial alienation could realistically be remedied without freedom and independence from French rule. This talk discusses a handful of the many activities and writings that Fanon dedicated to the Algerian revolution and its revolutionaries. 

Conversation between Samia Henni and Mohamed Bourouissa

Mohamed Bourouissa (born in Blida, Algeria, in 1978) is an artist based in Paris. Working with photography, video, painting and sculpture, Bourouissa’s projects often examine socio-economic processes, invisible tensions between different social milieus and the related cultural divisions. In 2020 he was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Rencontres d’Arles (2019); the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2018); the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018); the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (2017); the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016); the Haus der Kunst, Munich and the FRAC Franche-Comté, Besançon (2014). He has participated in biennials and triennials in Marseille and Sydney (2020), Sharjah, Milan and Liverpool (2019), Havana and Lyon (2015), Venice (2011), Berlin (2010) and Algiers (2009).

Samia Henni is an architectural historian who teaches at the Department of Architecture, Cornell University. 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); the editor of War Zones (gta Verlag, 2018) and the maker of the exhibitions Housing Pharmacology / Right to Housing (Marseille, 2020) and Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, 2017–19). She received her PhD in the history and theory of architecture (with distinction, ETH Medal) from ETH Zurich and has taught at Princeton University, ETH Zurich and Geneva University of Art and Design.

[Mohamed Bourouissa (born in Blida,
Algeria, in 1978) is an artist
based in Paris.]



[Samia Henni is an architectural historian
who teaches at the Department of
Architecture, Cornell University.]

For the third event in the context of the Hostile Environment(s) expanded platform we will be reflecting on the violence perpetrated by colonial institutions and on the role of gardening as a form of healing. We will do this by considering anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon and his experience of the psychiatric hospital of Blida-Joinville in Algeria. The screening of the film The Whispering of Ghosts by artist Mohamed Bourouissa will be followed by a talk by architect and researcher Samia Henni. This will serve as an entry point for a conversation connecting history to the present and touching upon issues of liberation though care, gardening, architecture, counter revolution and memory.

PROGRAMME

Screening of Mohamed Bourouissa’s
The Whispering of Ghosts, 2018, 13 min.

The Whispering of Ghosts is based on the psychiatric hospital in Blida, Algeria, where psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon worked as a doctor from 1953 to 1956 and where he first became aware of the structural problems with the psychiatric treatments offered to Algerian patients during the French colonial era. The film delves into the story of one of Fanon’s former patients, Bourlem Mohamed, who took up gardening as a form of occupational therapy and gave expression to the organisation of his mental space in the structure of the garden. The film is edited in an erratic fashion that follows Bourlem Mohamed’s trains of thought, jumping from his own memories of being a Fellagha (a freedom fighter in the anti-colonial Algerian War) to the planting and nurturing of the garden he created at the hospital in 1969. Gardening was one area in which Frantz Fanon hoped to end the segregation and separation of colonial and indigenous patients. Blida is also Mohamed Bourouissa’s hometown; his investigation of the hospital turns out to be an investigation of his own roots.

Talk by Samia Henni
Spaces of Alienation and Freedom: Frantz Fanon and the Algerian Revolution 

During the Algerian Revolution, which is also known as the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), psychiatrist and anticolonial activist and writer Frantz Fanon played a crucial role treating agonising psychological conditions on both sides of the armed conflict: at the psychiatric hospital of Blida-Joinville he treated Algerians who had been subjected to severe torture as well as French officers who had been torturing Algerians. In 1956, after three years of gruelling work in Algeria, Fanon resigned from his position because it had become clear to him that it was the French colonial regime that was producing and perpetuating the mental distress that he witnessed, and he did not believe that colonial alienation could realistically be remedied without freedom and independence from French rule. This talk discusses a handful of the many activities and writings that Fanon dedicated to the Algerian revolution and its revolutionaries. 

Conversation between Samia Henni and Mohamed Bourouissa

Mohamed Bourouissa (born in Blida, Algeria, in 1978) is an artist based in Paris. Working with photography, video, painting and sculpture, Bourouissa’s projects often examine socio-economic processes, invisible tensions between different social milieus and the related cultural divisions. In 2020 he was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Rencontres d’Arles (2019); the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2018); the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018); the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (2017); the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016); the Haus der Kunst, Munich and the FRAC Franche-Comté, Besançon (2014). He has participated in biennials and triennials in Marseille and Sydney (2020), Sharjah, Milan and Liverpool (2019), Havana and Lyon (2015), Venice (2011), Berlin (2010) and Algiers (2009).

Samia Henni is an architectural historian who teaches at the Department of Architecture, Cornell University. 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); the editor of War Zones (gta Verlag, 2018) and the maker of the exhibitions Housing Pharmacology / Right to Housing (Marseille, 2020) and Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, 2017–19). She received her PhD in the history and theory of architecture (with distinction, ETH Medal) from ETH Zurich and has taught at Princeton University, ETH Zurich and Geneva University of Art and Design.