Testimony Translation Project

Between 1960 and 1966, the French colonial regime detonated four atmospheric atomic bombs, thirteen underground nuclear bombs and conducted other nuclear experiments in the Algerian Sahara, whose natural resources were being extracted in the process. This secret nuclear weapons programme occurred during and after the Algerian Revolution, or the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). The resulting toxification of the Sahara spread radioactive fallout across Algeria, North, Central and West Africa, and the Mediterranean (including Southern Europe), causing irreversible and still ongoing contaminations of living bodies, cells and particles, as well as in the natural and built environments.

Together with a network of twenty collaborators from around the world and the architectural historian Samia Henni, Hoetger developed and edited Testimony Translation Database, an open access digital database that begins the long process of digitalizing and translating (between Tamazight, French, and English) over seven hundred pages of written and oral testimonies from Algerian and French victims of the French nuclear detonation program. Drawn from three key sources, the online repository includes a selection of forty testimonies ranging from individual recollections to intergenerational familial and community memories.