Strategic Landforms explores architectural production in French Senegal over the nineteenth century, marked by an increasing European colonial presence in the region. Here, landform, defined as “features on the Earth’s surface that make up the terrain” (British Geological Survey), replaces the often-used term “infrastructure” as a gateway to understanding colonial transportation networks, military fortifications, urban amenities, agricultural strategies, settlement patterns, and land tenure customs. This choice stems from the observation that thinking through “infrastructure” sets a framework in which technological development takes center stage. The subject becomes the “infra” of a not-yet-existing superstructure. On the other hand, landform as a concept acknowledges that intervening on the land entails participating in its formation. Attention to the ways of seeing and making landforms in West Africa guided the curation process of the displayed projects, organized in two sections, one on each wall of the hallway. On this side, selections from the Cartography Collection of the National Overseas Archives (Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer, ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence, France, display reproductions of drawings made by colonial military authorities during the 1800s. This section highlights the significant role of cartographic surveys and maps that were used as “weapons of imperialism” in the same way as guns and warships, as J.B. Harley demonstrated in his essay “Maps, Knowledge, and Power” (1988). This exhibition explores other visual artifacts and examines the projects of French military engineers and architects as first and foremost strategic landforms. In addition to cartography (Panel A), architectural drawings from ANOM reveal the colonialists’ understanding of terrain and underground interventions. These include section drawings of military structures (Panel B), sightline analyses that reveal the relations between topography, visibility thresholds, and visual control (Panel C), abstracted representations of the environment, either as geometric representations of the land (Panel D), or renderings experimenting with color and symbolism (Panel E). The opposite side of the hallway reenacts the construction of the first railway in West Africa by using a fictionalized graphic novel format. The accompanying text is based on research conducted at ANOM and the Lyon Municipal Archives during the summer of 2023. The novel invites us to rethink the utopian socialist ideas concurrent with railway development, which maintained the colonial rhetoric of bringing peace to West Africa through modernizing infrastructure. The exhibit presents the Cayor resistance—a West African nation—to railway construction less as an opposition to modern technology but more as a struggle for self-determination and an alternative strategy of landforming. Under this light, the resistance movement in Cayor that supported desertification appears more akin to what we would today call environmental resistance, ecotage, or ecodefense.