The Bomb in/and/out of the Archive.
An Art, Technology, & Culture Colloquium lecture
with Zoé Samudzi
Postdoctoral scholar in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at Ohio State University
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Monday, November 9, 2026
5:00 — 6:30 PM
Eugene Jarvis Auditorium,
Grimes Engineering Center
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Begun during her 2026 residency at La Becque in Switzerland, Zoé Samudzi presents the inaugural project of the research constellation “Can the African Steal?” Through archival photographs of the Belgian Congo (c. 1929-30) at Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Samudzi stitches together a variegated visual forensic through image absence through the deployment of the black planetary (after Canham and Seedat) as an onto-epistemic and transnational geographic frame. The negative spaces in the Swiss archive enable a positively articulated materiality of the atomic bomb. Her tracing of uranium extraction and/as warcraft conjoins King Leopold’s free state and the Katangese mines in the Belgian Congo, the Trinity test in Los Alamos and Operation Crossroads in the Marshall Islands, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuclear afterlives in Japan.
About Zoé Samudzi
Zoé Samudzi is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at The Ohio State University. She holds a PhD in Medical Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco. Her research contends with genocide memory and the multiplicity of denialisms, political mythologies of the postcolonial African state, visuality and the ethics of photographic seeing and witnessing, and the spatialities of racecraft and dispossession. An art critic and writer, Samudzi is an associate editor with Parapraxis Magazine, a popular magazine dedicated to psychoanalytic thinking. She is a 2026 Public Parking editorial resident, a 2026 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant grantee for her project, “The Citizen and the Anthropophage: Postwar/Postcolonial Italian Memory and the Cannibal Boom,” a 2026 resident at La Becque’s Principal Residency Program, and an awardee of the 2026 Fire Station Studios' International Curator Residency.
About Art, Technology, & Culture Colloquium
Founded by Professor Ken Goldberg in 1997, the Arts, Technology & Culture lecture series at BCNM is an internationally respected forum for creative ideas. Always free of charge and open to the public, the series has presented over 200 leading artists, writers, and critical thinkers who question assumptions and push boundaries at the forefront of art, technology, and culture.
Accessibility
BCNM events are free and open to the public. This event will be held in-person, on the UC Berkeley campus. We strive to meet all access and accommodation needs. Please contact (raphaelcohen [at] berkeley.edu) with requests or questions.
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