Português
Pivô hosts the artist and researcher Denise Bertschi, who will present her research followed by a conversation with artists Aline Motta and Pedro Zylbersztayn. The event will be moderated by Pivô’s curator, Sylvia Monasterios.
The lecture presents the newly emerged PhD of artist and urban researcher Denise Bertschi (1983, Switzerland), conducted at the ‘Arts of Sciences Laboratory’ at EPFL Lausanne.
The talk is followed by a round-table discussion with artists Aline Motta (1974, Niterói), and Pedro Zylbersztajn (1993, São Paulo).
Informed by Denise Bertschi’s longstanding artistic research, this talk approaches entanglements of Swiss coloniality in Brazil and Switzerland under the lens of land, archive and visuality. The enduring environmental historical legacies of the plantationocene in the former Colônia Leopoldina (1818–1894) in Northeastern Brazil was heavily shaped by Swiss plantation owners, who relied on slavery-based exploitation of both land and workers. The long process from land grab, deforestation to the settlement of monocultural coffee plantations in the 19th century is echoed in the contemporary condition of Helvécia, a Quilombo community of descendants from Colônia Leopoldina‘s enslaved African Brazilians and today‘s orbiting megastructure of eucalyptus plantations. Violent memories from slavery times are highly connected to (invisible) signs in the landscape that circle today‘s Helvécia, which stand in stark contrast to the historiography of the Swiss plantocracy‘s official archives.
Represented and protected by a Swiss national consulate placed on the colony in the mid 19th-century in a crucial moment of Swiss nation-building, when the Confoederatio Helvetica received its first modern constitution, this research demonstrates the Swiss state‘s making not only in the homeland but on distant land and its direct involvement in coloniality in Brazil. With a focus on aesthetic and spatial processes, this research project contributes to Swiss colonial history with a precise in-situ case study between Bahia in Brazil and Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where most of Colônia Leopoldina‘s planters originated from, and considerable colonial capital was converted into the city‘s architectural and institutional landscape. Reconnecting these entangled territories is urgently necessary not only to understand the ecological ruination in the plantation but to introduce another way of reading the Swiss landscape shaped by colonialism and slavery. Denise Bertschi’s ultimate goal is to tackle questions of longue-durée implications of Swiss coloniality in Brazil, its responsibility, and the (im-)possibilities of repair.
Pivô Hosts | Echoing Swiss Coloniality: Land, Archive, Visuality between Brazil and Switzerland
With Denise Bertschi, Aline Motta, and Pedro Zylbersztajn
May 15 | Wednesday
7:00 PM
At the library of Pivô São Paulo
Free admission (*subject to maximum capacity limitations)
Art practitioner Denise Bertschi holds a doctorate in Arts, Architecture and Environmental Sciences from the “Arts of Sciences Laboratory” at EPFL Switzerland. Her artistic research is located at the intersection of visual culture, critical urbanism and history. She critically investigates not only archives, but landscapes or the built environment on their colonial entanglement related to Switzerland’s role in extra-European expansion. Her academic and artistic work takes the form of video installations, book publications, or films and raises questions about cultural myths, such as Swiss neutrality or Switzerland’s coloniality.
Denise Bertschi’s multi-awarded work is widely exhibited; in the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris, the Swiss National Museum, the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Artsonje in Seoul (South Korea), the Artivist in Johannesburg (South Africa) or LACA Los Angeles. She was previously a Getty Research Summer Fellow (Los Angeles) and artist in residence with Pro Helvetia, La Becque and CAN Centre d’Art de Neuchâtel. She published several monographs, including “State Fiction. The Gaze of the Swiss Neutral Mission in the Korean DMZ” (Centre de la Photographie Genève, 2021), “Strata. Mining Silence” (Aargauer Kunsthaus, 2020), and her newest book, the co-edited volume “Unearthing Traces. Dismantling the imperialist entanglements of archives, landscapes and the built environment” (EPFL Press, 2023).
Combines different techniques and artistic practices in her work, such as photography, video, installation, performance, and collage. In a critique way, her works reconfigure memories, particularly Afro-Atlantic memories, and construct new narratives that invoke a non-linear idea of time.
She was awarded the Itaú Cultural Rumos Program 2015/2016, the ZUM Photography Scholarship from the Instituto Moreira Salles 2018, and the 7th Marcantonio Vilaça National Industry Award 2019. She has recently participated in important exhibitions such as “Feminist Histories, artists after 2000” – MASP, “Afro-Atlantic Histories” – MASP/Tomie Ohtake, “When the world changes” – Kirchner Cultural Center, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and “Rethinking everything” – Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, France. She opened her solo exhibition “Aline Motta: memory, travel, and water” at MAR/Museum of Art of Rio in 2020. In 2021, she showcased her video works at the New Museum (NY) in the program “Screen Series”. In 2022, she released her first book “Water is a Time Machine” published by Fósforo and Luna Parque Edições, opened a solo exhibition in the atrium of Sesc Belenzinho, and in the video room of MASP. In 2023, she exhibited at the 15th Sharjah Biennial, and at MoMA in “Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond,” and soon, at the 35th São Paulo Art Biennial.
Participated in the exhibition Between Our Knots: Ten Years of ZUM/IMS Grant in 2023