Through close analysis of two multimodal media works (cartographic, cinematic, photographic, and sculptural) that chart the enduring afterlife of French nuclear imperialism within Saharan landscapes and lives, this paper investigates the critical possibilities of aesthetic representation for apprehending and addressing the toxicity of “slow violence” that targets desert ecosystems for destruction. France’s first seventeen nuclear bombs (1960-1966) scarred the Algerian Sahara with a radiological legacy whose impact has not been measured, surveyed, or fully studied, let alone redressed. Maps and archives are political fictions that have reflected and facilitated destructive power that has rendered seventeen nuclear bombs in the Sahara both justifiable and forgettable. In this situation, I make a case for centering aesthetic works as "anarchival" alternatives to legal frameworks for responding to the ongoing threat of nuclear harm. Elisabeth Leuvrey’s documentary film AT(h)OME (Les Éditions du large, 2013) combines landscape and portrait photographs by Bruno Hadjih with archival and contemporary audio and visual recordings that explore the obscured afterlife of the French nuclear bomb called “Béryl.” On May 2, 1962, this bomb escaped its subterranean detonation chamber inside the mountain Taourirt Tan-Afella to devastate the lives of those in a nearby village called Mertoutek, and it is often singled out as the worst “accident” in French nuclear history. The title of Ammar Bouras’s multimedia installation 24°3’55”N 5°3’23”E (Espaco Gallery Algiers, 2017) connects it directly to AT(h)OME, as this geolocation coordinate specifies the latitude and longitude of Béryl’s detonation point inside the granite mountain Taourirt Tan-Afella. Neither AT(h)OME nor 24°3’55”N 5°3’23”E take up the French-Algerian archival dispute. Ambivalent toward locked archives and state-sponsored legal redress, these works turn our attention to more radical anarchival possibilities inscribed in the radiant materiality of the desert itself.