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Unearthing Traces
With the swissuniversities doctoral course Unearthing Traces we propose to explore and learn about memory processes, power structures in archival practices in relation to the built environment and material architectural traces. With the participation of a wide array of thinkers and practitioners in archival and artistic practices, historians and researcher in architecture and social sciences, the course explores how imagined records and traces can be composed and grounded in the context of academic research in order to implement them into a historical argumentation. A particular emphasis will be made on architectural and spatial traces and records both through the methodologies of urban critical and postcolonial studies and through questioning the imperialist dimensions of the architecture of archives and built environments. After two days in the form of a conference, the fieldwork in Neuchâtel constitutes both an opportunity to actively apply these methodologies, and to question the colonial entanglements of Switzerland through a collective and embodied research process in situ. Students across different disciplines — architecture, history, arts, political sciences — will be solicited, in order to decompartmentalize disciplines in this process.
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History pledges to be faithful to the limits of fact, evidence, and archive, even as those dead certainties are produced by terror. I wanted to write a romance that exceeded the fictions of history, the rumours, scandals, lies, invented evidence, fabricated confessions, volatile facts, impossible metaphors, chance events, and fantasies that constitute the archive and determine what can be said about the past. I longed to write a new story, one unfettered by the constraints of the legal documents and exceeding the restatement and transpositions, which comprised my strategy for disordering and transgressing the protocols of the archive and the authority of its statements and which enabled me to augment and intensify its fictions.
Saidiya, Hartman. Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe 12, no 2 (2008): 9.
The spreading of archival practices responds to one of the major issues faced by communities in decolonization processes; the monopoly of knowledge and the destruction of other forms of knowledge circulation by imperial powers, enacting barriers to other histories than the dominant ones (Stoler 2008). The rejection of other records still constitutes a major obstacle to the legitimation of cultures and alternative narratives, and sometimes, to the achievement of justice (Caswell 2014). This phenomenon is emphasized by intersectionality, by belonging to several minorities based on race, gender, sexuality, economic class… Beyond the intentional segregation of archival documents, the “absence” in archives is grounded on the limits of the sayable (Hartmann 2008), issued from the episteme and techne of a time (Foucault 1966). Thus, western archives, by standardizing the ontology of their documents hid, erased, obstructed and devaluated certain (organic) forms of knowledge (Povinelli 2011), amplifying the biases of misrepresentations. The European urban environment still supports and perpetuates the economies of symbols of colonialism (Mbembe 2002), both in their physical materiality and virtually, from the origins of materials to the toponymy of their places. As such, there is an urge to deconstruct and re-ground our understanding and reading of both our archives and our environments in relation to one another, to unearth hidden traces, exhume obstructed narratives and give ground to “potential histories” (Azoulay 2019).
Since the Archival turn (Simon 2002) in artistic and academic practices, more and more archival practitioners developed methodologies to deal with imagined records (Gilliland and Caswell 2015), untaken photographs (Azoulay 2012), missing pictures (Pahn 2013), ghostly matters (Gordon 1997), or haunting legacies (Schwab 2010). The multiplicity of textures and materialities of these documents and records, from the hidden or forgotten spatial traces to embodied traumas and imaginary photographs, shed light on the growing prominence of imagination, critical/speculative fabulation (Hartmann 2008, Haraway 2016) and affect (Dever 2010) in archival and historical practices to recover buried histories. In doing so, the aim is not to give voice to the deads, “but rather to imagine what cannot be verified [...]. It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive.” (Hartman 2008:12), in order to consider “at once the positive objects and methods of history and social science and the matter absent, entangled and unavailable by its method” (Lowe 2006, 208).
Engaging with the local context of Neuchâtel as one of the most implicated Swiss cities in a “colonial Switzerland without colonies” (Purtschert 2012), we aim to rehearse (Azoulay, 2019) a set of methodologies in tracing architectural structures and spacial situations regarding their material histories and political/economical existences. Switzerland was considered for a long time to be uninvolved in colonialism, supported by the narrative of its “neutral” role in world politics. Newer research has proved otherwise: The Swiss entanglement in a colonial world system as a quasi-imperialist power (Fischer-Tiné 2015) was marked by its strong interconnectedness through a Swiss economic expansion in a global trade system based on capitalist agriculture, land expropriation and deforestation or transit-trade with colonial goods as coffee, textiles or precious stones. Its surplus flowed back into the Swiss system, its built cities and institutions. To investigate these material witnesses (Schuppli 2020) of such historical connectedness, we will visit in Neuchâtel the following sites: the Villa of the Museum of Ethnography (MEN), the Hospital of Préfargier, the Place de Pury, the Espace Tilo Frey (formerly Espace Louis-Agassiz), and others.
We reflect on how to decolonise public space, and how to mediate multi-layered histories of architectural sites while problematising their economic and cultural entanglements through perceiving the “spirit of place”. Current public debates and practices around erasing statues of colonists and men involved in slavery in the wake of the #blacklivesmatter has also begun to shake the swiss society and reflections around the built environment. What is the legitimation of maintaining such names, monuments, buildings without awareness of the racializing practices they stand for? How to narrate, analyze and write revisited historiographies and how to move on from here? The Centre d’Art de Neuchâtel (CAN) serves as a basis of this research day while exploring the city with the aim to “unlearn” our gaze and ask new questions. As one of the organizers is currently in an artistic residency at the CAN, it is a useful way of bringing together academic and artistic interventions.
UNEARTHING TRACES IS ORGANISED BY
Denise Bertschi (HEAD – Genève/EPFL), initiator of Unearthing Traces, doctoral researcher and artist
Julien Lafontaine Carboni (EPFL), initiator of Unearthing Traces, doctoral researcher and architect (EPFL, Labo ALICE)
Stéphanie Ginalski (University of Lausanne), historian, maître d’enseignement et de recherche (UniL)
Lucía Jalón Oyarzun (EPFL), architect, post-doc and Head of Research at Atelier de la Conception de l'Espace (ALICE, EPFL)
Yves Pedrazzini (EPFL), senior scientist (Urban Sociology Laboratory)
CAN Centre d'Art Neuchâtel
THU 27 MAY
Online zoom
WELCOMING
PRESENTATION
10.00—12.00
(UTC +2)
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Introduction doctoral course (internal)
Denise Bertschi,
Julien Lafontaine Carboni
Internal event for Doctoral Students of Unearthing Traces
DECOLONIZING URBAN SPACES
15.00—17.00
(UTC +2)
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The Impossibility of an Architecture of Emancipation
Léopold Lambert
In his presentation, Léopold will attempt to show that, although the notion of “decolonized urban space” is not an impossibility as such, there cannot be a decolonial design of space. The nuance is fundamental as it frees us from the illusion that there exists an architecture of emancipation. Architecture is a weapon: it coerces, controls, and wounds. Like most weapons, it tends to benefit the dominant order, but can also at times serve revolutionary purposes. As such, architecture can occasionally be anti-colonial; yet never decolonial. Decoloniality consists of the dismantlement of the colonial structures, a large part of which having to do with the way the colonial order is enforced in the physical realms of bodies through architecture. In trying to illustrate this argument, the presentation will provide concrete examples in particular in Algeria and Palestine.
Léopold Lambert is a trained architect living in Paris. He is the editor-in-chief of the print and online magazine The Funambulist, which attempts to articulate anti-colonial and anti-racist perspectives on the politics of space and bodies. He is also an independent researcher and the author of the books Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012), Topie Impitoyable: The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street (punctum books, 2015), and Politics of Bulldozer: The Palestinian Ruin as an Israeli Project (B2, 2016, French). His new book is entitled States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum (2021, Premiers Matins de Novembre, French).
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De-patriarchalization of Public Space
Françoise Vergès
Cities have been built by and for able and bourgeois men who have littered them with statues and monuments that glorify class, gender and racial domination. Decolonizing urban spaces means its de-patriarchalization, but how? In this presentation, Françoise Vergès will look at feminist demonstrations and strikes to trace a process of decolonization that seeks to be intersectional.
Françoise Vergès (Reunion Island) held different jobs before obtaining a PhD in Political Theory (Berkeley, 1995). She is a decolonial feminist and antiracist activist, co-founder of Decolonize the Arts, and independent curator. Last publication: Une théorie féministe de la violence. Pour une politique antiraciste de la protection, La Fabrique, 2020.
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Psychotropic gold, postcolonial amnesia and new beginnings in Switzerland
Rohit Jain
For more than three centuries, Swiss commodity trade has been caught up in colonial, postcolonial and neoliberal entanglements. Yet, public debate on Swiss colonial complicity is reluctantly silent. Currently, more than on third of the global gold is refined in Switzerland. This business of trading and refining goes back to the collaboration with Nazi-Germany and Apartheid South Africa and is embedded in the commodity wars of today. In the Swiss hub gold is cleaned of its violent and physical history and transformed into an ephemeral symbol of power, status and purity—into condensed wealth. Switzerland is on gold! Gold is omnipresent, but not visible. It is psychotropically active, but politically and morally silent. How does the opaque and unacknowledged omnipresence of gold affect postcolonial urban spaces in Switzerland? And how to crack the compulsively clean and orderly surface of postcolonial amnesia and white guilt? How is it possible, then, to activate latent archives to initiate a politics of reparation and new beginnings….
Images: Psychotropic gold, postcolonial amnesia and new beginnings in Switzerland, © Rohit Jain
Rohit Jain is a social anthropologist, artistic researcher and anti-racism activist based in Berne and Zurich. His aim is to understand, how postcolonial public spaces can be re-arranged, in order to transform histories of violence into new beginnings. After getting his PhD from the University of Zurich he was engaged in collaborative artistic projects on Swiss involvement in gold trade, on urban citizenship and on antiracist humour amongst others at Shedhalle Zurich, Ausstellungsraum Klingenthal Basel and Zurich University of the Arts. Lately, he has published pieces on postmigrant memory politics, decolonizing art institutions, and postcolonial amnesia in the Swiss gold hub. With many friends and allies he has been engaged in building up Institute New Switzerland, a young Think & Act Tank on postmigration and antiracism.
17.30—18.45
(UTC +2)
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A curriculum for mud
Nolan Oswald Dennis
A curriculum for mud is a set of research assemblages for modelling relations between decolonial knowledge, black space and African time. As a project, a curriculum for mud emerges from a specific interest in closed environment facilities and other ecological modelling infrastructure which are primarily located in urban space (which is to say alienated from the sites they model). By subtending flesh-centric racializing-assemblages (genres of the human) with animal/machine-ecologies of place-making (genres of the planet) a curriculum for mud approaches decolonisation as a more or less opaque system of transformation of the general environment. Basically: What kinds of malpractices at the site of these infrastructures might make decolonial possibility, in whatever limited form, available to us now? Can we - with general antagonism and in relative proximity to racializing infrastructure; capitalist (eco)logics of crisis; and colonial relations of knowledge - reengineer the disposition of these facilities to model other relations?
Nolan Oswald Dennis is an interdisciplinary artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. His practice explores the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization, questioning the politics of space (and time) through a system-specific, rather than site-specific approach. He holds a bachelors degree in architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and a Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is a founding member of tech healing agency NTU, as well as the Index Literacy Program, a collaborative research project between the US, Brazil and South Africa collecting new theory for our indexical present. Nolan Oswald Dennis is a research associate at the Visual Identities In Art and Design (VIAD) research centre at the University of Johannesburg; a Digital Earth research fellow in the Planetary Sensorium program and 2021 artist-in-residence at ntu-cca, Singapore. He is currently co-editor of Indexing Imaginaries, the 8th volume in the Data Browser book series published by Open Humanities Press.
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Round table, Q & A
Moderation: Lucía Jalón Oyarzun
Lucía Jalón Oyarzun is an architect and researcher trained at the ETSAM School of Architecture of Madrid where she also defended her PhD, “Exception and the rebel body: the political as generator of a minor architecture” in 2017. Since 2019 she is a post-doc and Head of Research at ALICE (Atelier de la Conception de l’Espace)/EPFL, where she continues her interdisciplinary research on the conflict between the spatial forms used by politics and the exception, and the commons created by the rebel body. From 2017 to 2020 she was Director of Academic Affairs at Escuela SUR, a postgraduate interdisciplinary art program in Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid. She has taught for several years at the ETSAM School of Architecture of Madrid, and has been invited to several international universities. Her work, ranging from scientific production to cultural critique, has been published in several journals and publications.
FRI 28 MAY
Online zoom
ARCHITECTURE, COLONIALISM AND ARCHIVES.
RE-IMAGINING THE HERITAGE.
12.00—13.30
(UTC +2)
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Farm Warfare in Gaza: Unearthing the Testimony of the Land
Shourideh C. Molavi
This talk examines the historical production and ongoing maintenance of the eastern ‘border’ of the occupied Gaza Strip with Israel in the wake of the 2018 Great March of Return. Against the backdrop of over seven decades of Israeli settler-colonialism, a ‘buffer zone’ has been formed along Gaza's border with Israel through the denial of Palestinian access to agricultural lands, periodic military confrontation, the uprooting and grazing of farmlands, and the latest practice of herbicidal spraying. During the Great March, the slow violence of this gradual border production culminated in the fast killing of human bodies. Using a range of assembled practices, including visual and fieldwork methodologies, this talk will unpack the link between these forms of violence and locate the destruction of the environment and the destruction of the body in time and space. In doing so, I examine the ways in which the testimony and of the land can be documented as an archive of knowledge along the human testimony to confront the historical erasure of state crimes and expose forms of ongoing settler-colonial violence.
Image: Herbicide concentration on ground in occupied Gaza
Shourideh C. Molavi is a writer and scholar specializing in critical state theory, migration and border studies, and trained with a background in International Humanitarian Law. She has over 15 years of academic and fieldwork experience in the Middle East — focusing on Israel/Palestine — on the politics of space, citizenship and statelessness, and human and minority rights, with an emphasis on the relationship between the law, violence and power.
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Archival Violence
Samia Henni
Samia Henni is an architectural historian and Assistant Professor of History of Architecture and Urbanism at the Department of Architecture, College of Architecture, Art and Planning, Cornell University. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (gta Verlag, 2017, EN; Editions B42, 2019, FR), the editor of War Zones, gta papers 2 (gta Verlag, 2018), and the maker of exhibitions, such as Housing Pharmacology/Right to Housing (Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020) and Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, 2017–19).
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Wastelands of Empire: Colonial Mediations of the Earth as Property
Hollyamber Kennedy
In the complex interplay between concept and technical practice, land reclamation was integral to the development of the modern territorial imagination. This was especially true for states whose overseas colonial policies were informed by internal colonial practices in domestic rural zones, as was the case with imperial Germany and, some years later, fascist Italy, whose modes of governance were shaped in fundamental ways by their Ministries of Agriculture and the rural modernization programs they instituted to “reclaim” the countryside at sites of ethno-political and class conflict. The models of development that emerged from these reconstituted “settler frontiers,” linked across time and geographies, index a historical shift in the practices of territorial imperialism, confronted by emancipation movements. This turn was distinguished by a new power over space, specifically spatial and material-technical manifestations of the nation-state, attended by new spatial understandings, that were bound indivisibly to the colonial encounter, in which the severing of traditional rights to land, the divestment and subsequent cultivation of land and body—the extraction and reclamation of raw material and labor—served as the point of departure for the production of the national self. To access the full and divergent meanings of this modern form of regeneration through violence, captured in the physical and bureaucratic process of land reclamation, is to think this history alongside the material, aesthetic, and epistemic legacies of human violence and mass displacement that were its counterpart, a retelling that requires new skills and border-crossing methodologies.
Hollyamber Kennedy is a historian of modern architecture and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. Her work explores the intersection of modern architecture, colonial science, and processes of territorialization, and her research centers the role of anti-colonial and anti-partition resistance in the shaping of the colonial built environment. She previously held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Harvard University, at the Mahindra Humanities Center, as part of a four-year project on Migration and the Humanities. Her research has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the DAAD, SAH, and CAA. Her writing has been published by Grey Room, The University of Chicago Press, Avery Review, MIT Press, and Whitechapel Gallery. She has an essay forthcoming with Aggregate that is a part of the Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration series, and a chapter in a forthcoming book edited by Itohan Osayimwese on The Architectural Legacies of German Colonialism in Africa. She is currently working on a long-term collaborative project with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi exploring concept histories of settlement. She received her PhD in Architectural History and Theory from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
14.00—15.30
(UTC +2)
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Studio: A neutral plantation? Agrocapitalist expansion and Swiss coloniality in Brazil
Denise Bertschi
Image: Helvécia (Brazil), Photography: Denise Bertschi, 2017
In the last 15 years, a public realization about the longue-durée implications of Switzerland in colonialism and slavery has unfolded. This lecture seeks to uproot traces and overgrown paths, forcefully forgotten or at the contrary, hyper-present for the people that lived through this violent history. As artist-researcher I revisit the plantation, in order to spatialize and give an image to signifying spaces of the plantation. Guided by the inhabitants of today’s Quilombo community Helvécia, we root out such places of memory — the former coffee plantation, the ‘casa grande’, the slave owners house, the old cemetery or the slave port — in order to undo the erasure of this chapter from Swiss history and take responsibility for its past.
The historical example of the plantation Helvécia, founded in the beginning of the 19th century, was embedded in a conglomerate of plantations run by several Swiss families as well as some Germans under the name of Colonîa Leopoldina. Indeed, these Swiss plantation owners were white settlers leaving Switzerland to the so called ‘New World’ for expanding profit on grabbed land by the empire of Brazil. As it is often mentioned, to speak about a purely individual enterprise would not be justified, as the wider colony, of which Helvécia was part of, was managed, supported, overviewed and regulated by a Swiss national consulate, founded as globally one of the first in Brazil after 1848. Concurrently, this marks a foundational nation-building moment, when Switzerland received its first Federal Constitution under the name of Confoederatio Helvetica. Therefore, a state involvement with colonialism cannot be reduced to private actors or individual companies by any means.
This analysis aims to reduce the distance to seemingly far-away places, and spatialize these terrains of colonial capitalism back to the built environment of our Swiss cities, considerably built with capital flows of surplus value extracted elsewhere. Frantz Fanon noted that “the colonial world is not only where colonizers go. It is a system that encloses city and suburb, rural and wasteland, and the roads and waterways that provide or are carved to provide transport.”
This presentation is part of Denise Bertschi's ongoing PhD research at EPFL Lausanne, in collaboration with HEAD–Genève
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Round table, Q & A
Moderation: Nitin Bathla,
Julien Lafontaine Carboni
Nitin Bathla is an architect and researcher pursuing Doctoral Studies at ETH Zurich. He is currently working towards his PhD entitled Delhi without borders. Nitin regularly collaborates with film-makers, artist, and civil society organisations in order to bridge the research-activism divide.
Julien Lafontaine Carboni is an architect. They graduated at ENSA Paris-Malaquais and currently pursues a PhD research at the ALICE Laboratory, EPFL. Julien published in several architectural, philosophical and anthropological journal such as Architecture and Culture, and Tabula Rasa. They investigates non-visual epistemologies to thread spatial histories. Bodies, gestures and words enact and perform spatialities, implying other forms of historicity concealed by the architectural disciplinarization and epistemicide. Thus, their aim is to replace architectural political agency in gestures themselves, while proposing a critical architectural historiography and theory.
IMAGINED RECORDS AND CRITICAL FABULATIONS.
RE-THREADING HISTORIES.
16.30—18.00
(UTC +2)
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The Exorbitant Struggle
Doreen Mende
How many more traces do we need to unearth from archives for evidencing that global racial capitalism is not only foundationally inscribed, but continuously maintained in those institutions claiming historical knowledge? The talk is a curatorial inquiry to begin with ourselves: It will address the structural scene of inquiry – in my case, the entanglement of the art school, the exhibition and curatorial research – as a “problem-space” (David Scott) in which the problem is not solved but mobilized as a “problem for thought” (Nahum Dimitri Chandler) to oppose complicity towards complexity. Furthermore, it will speak about micro-practices from the expanded field of art as rehearsals for “unlearning our complicity” (Ariella Aïsha Azoulay) with the macro-structures of power claiming historical knowledge, and thus, it will want to sojourn within the exorbitant struggle that emerges between the micro and the macro, in which the and between the two does neither offer a field of accumulation nor addition, but where the and makes space and time for stammering, listening, tussling, failing, confronting and socializing towards a work of research for decolonial times.
Doreen Mende is a curator, theorist, exhibition-maker, educator, associate professor of curatorial/politics and director of the Critical Curatorial Cybernetic Research Practices (CCC-RP), Master and PhD-Forum, at Visual Arts Department at HEAD Genève. Through various curatorial mobilizations, essayistic writing and academic publications, she has developed the concept of “archival metabolism” as methodology to foster a vocabulary for the geopolitics as well as chronopolitics of exhibiting practices and artmaking within a post-1989 world. She is currently Principal Investigator of Decolonizing Socialism. Entangled Internationalism, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. From 2008 to 2015, Mende has been faculty member of the Dutch Art Institute while completing her doctoral studies in Curatorial/Knowledge at Visual Cultures of Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a co-founding member of the European Forum for Advanced Practices (EFAP), a co-founding member of Multiple Artistic Mobilities at University Zurich, and a co-founding director of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin.
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The Im/possibility of a Black Swiss History
Jovita dos Santos Pinto
In dominant historiographical accounts of Switzerland and Europe, people of color are portrayed as part of a recently arrived, postcolonial immigration to the continent. This understanding is based on a colonial amnesia that has shaped political, social and scientific discourses in Switzerland for the last decades. Concurrently it has represented people and communities of color in a “static foreignness”, overriding personal and shared experiences as well as historical facts.
In my presentation, I want to ask, what happens if we willfully insist on narrating the lives and stories of these subjects deemed impossible? Based on my ongoing PhD research on historical Black female figures in Switzerland since the 1800’s, I want to inquire critical fabulation as a way to link the found fragments, discontinuities, gaps and silences into a Black Swiss History, as a willful aberration (an imagining of an otherwise) to the tales of the nation state.
Jovita dos Santos Pinto writes a dissertation on Black Women and the Swiss Public Sphere. She is the initiator of histnoire.ch – a documentation of Black Women* in the Swiss Public, and co-founder of Bla*Sh – network of Black women* and non-binary persons.
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Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work
Michelle Caswell
This talk responds to ongoing discussions about “diversifying” archives at predominantly white institutions, arguing that archivists can and should do more to disrupt white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy beyond the standard liberal solutions of more diverse collecting and more inclusive description. Grounded in the emerging field of critical archival studies, the talk will address how dominant western archival theories and practices are oppressive by design while looking toward the radical politics of community archives to envision new liberatory theories and practices. Drawing from ethnography at community archives sites in the U.S., including the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), the talk will explore how members of minoritized communities activate records to build solidarities across and within communities, trouble linear progress narratives and disrupt cycles of oppression. It will propose a new framework for understanding liberatory memory work, including its temporal, representational, and material aspects, ultimately arguing that archival disruptions in time and space should be neither about the past nor the future, but about the liberatory affects and effects of memory work in the present.
Michelle Caswell, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Archival Studies in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Caswell directs a team of students at UCLA’s Community Archives Lab, which explores the ways that independent, identity-based memory organizations document, shape, and provide access to the histories of minoritized communities, with a particular emphasis on understanding their affective, political, and artistic impact. In 2008, together with Samip Mallick, Caswell co-founded the South Asian American Digital Archive, an online repository that documents and provides access to the stories of South Asian Americans. She is the author of the books Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge Press, 2021) and Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), as well as more than 40 peer-reviewed articles in critical archival studies.
18.30—19.45
(UTC +2)
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MY BODY, MY ARCHIVE
Studio: Faustin Linyekula
Good evening to you all, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Kabako, I am Kabako, again Kabako, forever Kabako. Kabako is my name, I am a storyteller. I have a little story for you tonight, a trip to Banataba.
Banataba is my maternal grandfather’s birthplace, a village on the banks of the River, a village in the forest, approximately 150 km South of Kisangani. But I had to go through New York City to get to Banataba.
It all began indeed with an invitation by the Metropolitan Museum in New York City to imagine a performance in one of their galleries. My first request was to see all the pieces from the Congo that are part of the Met collections.
Yes, wherever I go, I’m always searching for the Congo.
That’s for sure a senseless obsession because, to quote King Leopold II, the Congo doesn’t exist!
There’s only a river and the forest. The Congo doesn’t exist but wherever I go I keep searching for a piece of this mirror that’s been shattered by History andwhose fragments had been scattered across the world. I’m searching for a tiny little key to decipher and make sense of the ruins that I inherited from my fathers.
In the Met collections there are slightly over 100 pieces from the Congo. Amongst them a wooden statue, 83 cm high, black,white, ochre pigments, and a tag “Lengola People”.
I immediately wanted to shape the performance around this statue, despite resistance from the Met African arts curatorswho deem it insignificant. That’s why it’s been kept in storage since joining the Met collections in 1986, that’s why nobody ever bothered to research its story.
But this was the most important piece in the Museum for me, the only one that could say something about my ancestors, about who I am. Because my mother is Lengola. So was Yanga, my maternal grandfather, born in Banataba, somewhere South of Kisangani, on the banks of the River, in the forest.
Faustin Linyekula is a dancer, choreographer and storyteller who lives and works in Kisangani (Democratic Republic of Congo). He combines the strength of theatre, the expressive power of dance and a sharp political perspective as he explores post-colonial reality with courage and humour. Faustin Linyekula grew up and studied literature and theatre in Kisangani. He lived for a time in Nairobi and in 1997 co-founded the first contemporary dance company in Kenya with Opiyo Okach and Afrah Tenambergen. He returned to Kinshasa in June 2001 and set up Studios Kabako, a dance and visual theatre organisation designed as a place for interaction, research and creation. With his company, Faustin Linyekula has written some fifteen plays that have been performed on major stages and at major festivals in Europe, Africa and North and South America.
Faustin Linyekula has also designed performances for museums, for instance in New York at MOMA in 2012 and the Metropolitan Musem en 2017, and in Marseille at the Mucem in 2016. Other collaborations include a production for the Comédie Française (Bérénice, 2009), a show for the Ballet de Lorraine (La Création du monde 1923-2012) and a solo for a dancer from the CNB - Ballet National du Portugal (2016). Faustin Linyekula regularly teaches in Africa, in the United States and in Europe.
In 2007 he was awarded the Grand Prix by the Prince Claus Foundation for culture and development. In 2016, Faustin Linyekula was associated artist for the City of Lisbon and was awarded the city’s medal of cultural merit. In 2014, Faustin and Studios Kabako were awarded first prize by the CurryStone Foundation in the United States for the work carried out in Kisangani. In 2019, Faustin was associated artist at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam, and was winner of the Tallberg-Eliasson Global Leadership Award.
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Round table, Q & A
Moderation: Stéphanie Ginalski
Coming soon
SAT 29 MAY
Neuchâtel
LANDSCAPE OF MEMORY.
MATERIAL AND SYMBOLICAL TRACES OF COLONIALISM.
09.30—12.30 (UTC +2)
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Welcoming at CAN, Centre d'Art de Neuchâtel
Denise Bertschi,
Julien Lafontaine Carboni
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City walk on the colonial architectural traces
Izabel Barros
Izabel Barros (São Paulo/Piauí, BR), Program responsible for feminist peace Policy at the cfd, intersectional feminist and human rights activist in Brazil and Switzerland. Graduated in History and Sociology, member of the collectives Taoca and Berner Rassismus Stammtisch. Both in her historiographic work and in her engagement as an activist, Izabel seeks to question power relations and promotes transdisciplinary cultural and global collaborations with an anti-colonial proposal. Between 2013 and 2020 she was responsible for different projects in Brazil and scientific contributor at the Cooperaxionfoundation. She is involved in the defense of self-determination and the demarcation of the ancestral territories of indigenous communities and quilombolas in the state of Maranhão. She accompanies and collaborates in several artistic projects in Switzerland: the podcast Wie die Geranium nach Bern verschleppt wurde with Denis Schwabenland (2020); Experi Theater, C*Walk and Black Box (2020–2021); partnership with the artist Laura Kalauz at Bone Festival in Bern (2020) and the project WeTalk.
INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE INVESTIGATION IN THE URBAN LANDSCAPE OF NEUCHÂTEL AND IN ITS INSTITUTIONS
14.00—16.00
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Individual research
Moderation: Yves Pedrazzini
16.30—18.30
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Studio
Abdessamad El Montassir
Abdessamad El Montassir is a multi-disciplinary artist, his research is centered on a trilogy: the right to forget, fictional and visceral narratives, and the trauma of anticipation.
In his body of work and research, the artist sets reflexive processes that invite us to rethink history and cartographies through collective or fictional narratives and immaterial archives.
His projects also question traumas and their impacts on individuals, their behavior and their socio-political evolution, and reveal processes where these traumas serve to historization. Abdessamad El Montassir tackles these problematics while taking into consideration the knowledge on non-human identities -plants- in order to ignite the emergence of renewed manners to think our environments.
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Final round table, Q & A
with guests from Neuchâtel
Happening at: Académie de Meuron, Quai Philippe-Godet 18, 2000 Neuchâtel (not public)
REGISTRATION FOR DOCTORAL STUDENTS
As a Swiss or international doctoral student, you can subscribe to the doctoral course Unearthing Traces for either 2 days (online conference on zoom) or 3 days (2 days online conference on zoom and 1 day fieldwork in Neuchâtel). We encourage doctoral students to take part to the full course and we treat these registrations with priority.
More details on the course
Full course: 2 ECTS
2 days (27—28 May 2021) on zoom
1 day (29 May 2021) in Neuchâtel
Food and travel costs are covered by swissuniversities.
Registration
Short course: 1 ECTS
2 days (27—28 May 2021) on zoom
Registration
REGISTRATION FOR EXTERNAL LISTENERS
The conference Unearthing Traces (27—28 May 2021) held on zoom is free of charge. Please register now and we will send you further information closer to date (zoom link, etc). Thank you for registering.
Registration
REGISTRATION
Doctoral student
External listener
CONTACT
Unearthing Traces
With the swissuniversities doctoral course Unearthing Traces we propose to explore and learn about memory processes, power structures in archival practices in relation to the built environment and material architectural traces. With the participation of a wide array of thinkers and practitioners in archival and artistic practices, historians and researcher in architecture and social sciences, the course explores how imagined records and traces can be composed and grounded in the context of academic research in order to implement them into a historical argumentation. A particular emphasis will be made on architectural and spatial traces and records both through the methodologies of urban critical and postcolonial studies and through questioning the imperialist dimensions of the architecture of archives and built environments. After two days in the form of a conference, the fieldwork in Neuchâtel constitutes both an opportunity to actively apply these methodologies, and to question the colonial entanglements of Switzerland through a collective and embodied research process in situ. Students across different disciplines — architecture, history, arts, political sciences — will be solicited, in order to decompartmentalize disciplines in this process.
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History pledges to be faithful to the limits of fact, evidence, and archive, even as those dead certainties are produced by terror. I wanted to write a romance that exceeded the fictions of history, the rumours, scandals, lies, invented evidence, fabricated confessions, volatile facts, impossible metaphors, chance events, and fantasies that constitute the archive and determine what can be said about the past. I longed to write a new story, one unfettered by the constraints of the legal documents and exceeding the restatement and transpositions, which comprised my strategy for disordering and transgressing the protocols of the archive and the authority of its statements and which enabled me to augment and intensify its fictions.
Saidiya, Hartman. Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe 12, no 2 (2008): 9.
The spreading of archival practices responds to one of the major issues faced by communities in decolonization processes; the monopoly of knowledge and the destruction of other forms of knowledge circulation by imperial powers, enacting barriers to other histories than the dominant ones (Stoler 2008). The rejection of other records still constitutes a major obstacle to the legitimation of cultures and alternative narratives, and sometimes, to the achievement of justice (Caswell 2014). This phenomenon is emphasized by intersectionality, by belonging to several minorities based on race, gender, sexuality, economic class… Beyond the intentional segregation of archival documents, the “absence” in archives is grounded on the limits of the sayable (Hartmann 2008), issued from the episteme and techne of a time (Foucault 1966). Thus, western archives, by standardizing the ontology of their documents hid, erased, obstructed and devaluated certain (organic) forms of knowledge (Povinelli 2011), amplifying the biases of misrepresentations. The European urban environment still supports and perpetuates the economies of symbols of colonialism (Mbembe 2002), both in their physical materiality and virtually, from the origins of materials to the toponymy of their places. As such, there is an urge to deconstruct and re-ground our understanding and reading of both our archives and our environments in relation to one another, to unearth hidden traces, exhume obstructed narratives and give ground to “potential histories” (Azoulay 2019).
Since the Archival turn (Simon 2002) in artistic and academic practices, more and more archival practitioners developed methodologies to deal with imagined records (Gilliland and Caswell 2015), untaken photographs (Azoulay 2012), missing pictures (Pahn 2013), ghostly matters (Gordon 1997), or haunting legacies (Schwab 2010). The multiplicity of textures and materialities of these documents and records, from the hidden or forgotten spatial traces to embodied traumas and imaginary photographs, shed light on the growing prominence of imagination, critical/speculative fabulation (Hartmann 2008, Haraway 2016) and affect (Dever 2010) in archival and historical practices to recover buried histories. In doing so, the aim is not to give voice to the deads, “but rather to imagine what cannot be verified [...]. It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive.” (Hartman 2008:12), in order to consider “at once the positive objects and methods of history and social science and the matter absent, entangled and unavailable by its method” (Lowe 2006, 208).
Engaging with the local context of Neuchâtel as one of the most implicated Swiss cities in a “colonial Switzerland without colonies” (Purtschert 2012), we aim to rehearse (Azoulay, 2019) a set of methodologies in tracing architectural structures and spacial situations regarding their material histories and political/economical existences. Switzerland was considered for a long time to be uninvolved in colonialism, supported by the narrative of its “neutral” role in world politics. Newer research has proved otherwise: The Swiss entanglement in a colonial world system as a quasi-imperialist power (Fischer-Tiné 2015) was marked by its strong interconnectedness through a Swiss economic expansion in a global trade system based on capitalist agriculture, land expropriation and deforestation or transit-trade with colonial goods as coffee, textiles or precious stones. Its surplus flowed back into the Swiss system, its built cities and institutions. To investigate these material witnesses (Schuppli 2020) of such historical connectedness, we will visit in Neuchâtel the following sites: the Villa of the Museum of Ethnography (MEN), the Hospital of Préfargier, the Place de Pury, the Espace Tilo Frey (formerly Espace Louis-Agassiz), and others.
We reflect on how to decolonise public space, and how to mediate multi-layered histories of architectural sites while problematising their economic and cultural entanglements through perceiving the “spirit of place”. Current public debates and practices around erasing statues of colonists and men involved in slavery in the wake of the #blacklivesmatter has also begun to shake the swiss society and reflections around the built environment. What is the legitimation of maintaining such names, monuments, buildings without awareness of the racializing practices they stand for? How to narrate, analyze and write revisited historiographies and how to move on from here? The Centre d’Art de Neuchâtel (CAN) serves as a basis of this research day while exploring the city with the aim to “unlearn” our gaze and ask new questions. As one of the organizers is currently in an artistic residency at the CAN, it is a useful way of bringing together academic and artistic interventions.
UNEARTHING TRACES IS ORGANISED BY
Denise Bertschi
(HEAD–Genève/EPFL), initiator
of Unearthing Traces,
doctoral researcher
and artist
Julien Lafontaine
Carboni (EPFL), initiator
of Unearthing Traces,
doctoral researcher
and architect (EPFL,
Labo ALICE)
Stéphanie Ginalski
(University of Lausanne),
historian, maître
d’enseignement et de
recherche (UniL)
Lucía Jalón Oyarzun
(EPFL), architect, post-doc
and Head of Research
at Atelier de la Conception
de l'Espace (ALICE, EPFL)
Yves Pedrazzini (EPFL),
senior scientist (Urban
Sociology Laboratory)
CAN Centre d'Art
Neuchâtel
A COURSE BY
IN THE FRAME OF
Doctoral Program of Architecture and Sciences of the City (EDAR-EPFL)
Center of International History and Political Studies of Globalization, University of Lausanne (UNIL)
swissuniversities
THU 27 MAY
Online zoom
WELCOMING
PRESENTATION
10.00—11.00
(UTC +2)
Introduction doctoral course (internal)
Denise Bertschi,
Julien Lafontaine Carboni
DECOLONIZING
URBAN SPACES
15.00—17.00
(UTC +2)
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The Impossibility of an
Architecture of Emancipation
Léopold Lambert
In his presentation, Léopold will attempt to show that, although the notion of “decolonized urban space” is not an impossibility as such, there cannot be a decolonial design of space. The nuance is fundamental as it frees us from the illusion that there exists an architecture of emancipation. Architecture is a weapon: it coerces, controls, and wounds. Like most weapons, it tends to benefit the dominant order, but can also at times serve revolutionary purposes. As such, architecture can occasionally be anti-colonial; yet never decolonial. Decoloniality consists of the dismantlement of the colonial structures, a large part of which having to do with the way the colonial order is enforced in the physical realms of bodies through architecture. In trying to illustrate this argument, the presentation will provide concrete examples in particular in Algeria and Palestine.
Léopold Lambert is a trained architect living in Paris. He is the editor-in-chief of the print and online magazine The Funambulist, which attempts to articulate anti-colonial and anti-racist perspectives on the politics of space and bodies. He is also an independent researcher and the author of the books Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012), Topie Impitoyable: The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street (punctum books, 2015), and Politics of Bulldozer: The Palestinian Ruin as an Israeli Project (B2, 2016, French). His new book is entitled States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum (2021, Premiers Matins de Novembre, French).
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De-patriarchalization
of Public Space
Françoise Vergès
Cities have been built by and for able and bourgeois men who have littered them with statues and monuments that glorify class, gender and racial domination. Decolonizing urban spaces means its de-patriarchalization, but how? In this presentation, Françoise Vergès will look at feminist demonstrations and strikes to trace a process of decolonization that seeks to be intersectional.
Françoise Vergès (Reunion Island) held different jobs before obtening a PhD in Political Theory (Berkeley, 1995). She is a decolonial feminist and antiracist activist, co-founder of Decolonize the Arts, and independent curator. Last publication: Une théorie féministe de la violence. Pour une politique antiraciste de la protection, La Fabrique, 2020.
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Psychotropic gold, postcolonial amnesia and new beginnings in Switzerland
Rohit Jain
For more than three centuries, Swiss commodity trade has been caught up in colonial, postcolonial and neoliberal entanglements. Yet, public debate on Swiss colonial complicity is reluctantly silent. Currently, more than on third of the global gold is refined in Switzerland. This business of trading and refining goes back to the collaboration with Nazi-Germany and Apartheid South Africa and is embedded in the commodity wars of today. In the Swiss hub gold is cleaned of its violent and physical history and transformed into an ephemeral symbol of power, status and purity—into condensed wealth. Switzerland is on gold! Gold is omnipresent, but not visible. It is psychotropically active, but politically and morally silent. How does the opaque and unacknowledged omnipresence of gold affect postcolonial urban spaces in Switzerland? And how to crack the compulsively clean and orderly surface of postcolonial amnesia and white guilt? How is it possible, then, to activate latent archives to initiate a politics of reparation and new beginnings…
Rohit Jain is a social anthropologist, artistic researcher and anti-racism activist based in Berne and Zurich. His aim is to understand, how postcolonial public spaces can be re-arranged, in order to transform histories of violence into new beginnings. After getting his PhD from the University of Zurich he was engaged in collaborative artistic projects on Swiss involvement in gold trade, on urban citizenship and on antiracist humour amongst others at Shedhalle Zurich, Ausstellungsraum Klingenthal Basel and Zurich University of the Arts. Lately, he has published pieces on postmigrant memory politics, decolonizing art institutions, and postcolonial amnesia in the Swiss gold hub. With many friends and allies he has been engaged in building up Institute New Switzerland, a young Think & Act Tank on postmigration and antiracism.
17.30—18.45
(UTC +2)
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Studio: A curriculum for mud
Nolan Oswald Dennis
A curriculum for mud is a set of research assemblages for modelling relations between decolonial knowledge, black space and African time. As a project, a curriculum for mud emerges from a specific interest in closed environment facilities and other ecological modelling infrastructure which are primarily located in urban space (which is to say alienated from the sites they model). By subtending flesh-centric racializing-assemblages (genres of the human) with animal/machine-ecologies of place-making (genres of the planet) a curriculum for mud approaches decolonisation as a more or less opaque system of transformation of the general environment.
Basically: What kinds of malpractices at the site of these infrastructures might make decolonial possibility, in whatever limited form, available to us now? Can we - with general antagonism and in relative proximity to racializing infrastructure; capitalist (eco)logics of crisis; and colonial relations of knowledge - reengineer the disposition of these facilities to model other relations?
Nolan Oswald Dennis is an interdisciplinary artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. His practice explores the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization, questioning the politics of space (and time) through a system-specific, rather than site-specific approach. He holds a bachelors degree in architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and a Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is a founding member of tech healing agency NTU, as well as the Index Literacy Program, a collaborative research project between the US, Brazil and South Africa collecting new theory for our indexical present. Nolan Oswald Dennis is a research associate at the Visual Identities In Art and Design (VIAD) research centre at the University of Johannesburg; a Digital Earth research fellow in the Planetary Sensorium program and 2021 artist-in-residence at ntu-cca, Singapore. He is currently co-editor of Indexing Imaginaries, the 8th volume in the Data Browser book series published by Open Humanities Press.
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Round table, Q & A
Moderation:
Lucía Jalón Oyarzun
Lucía Jalón Oyarzun is an architect and researcher trained at the ETSAM School of Architecture of Madrid where she also defended her PhD, “Exception and the rebel body: the political as generator of a minor architecture” in 2017. Since 2019 she is a post-doc and Head of Research at ALICE (Atelier de la Conception de l’Espace)/EPFL, where she continues her interdisciplinary research on the conflict between the spatial forms used by politics and the exception, and the commons created by the rebel body. From 2017 to 2020 she was Director of Academic Affairs at Escuela SUR, a postgraduate interdisciplinary art program in Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid. She has taught for several years at the ETSAM School of Architecture of Madrid, and has been invited to several international universities. Her work, ranging from scientific production to cultural critique, has been published in several journals and publications.
FRI 28 MAY
Online zoom
ARCHITECTURE, COLONIALISM AND ARCHIVES. RE-IMAGINING THE HERITAGE.
12.00—13.30
(UTC +2)
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Farm Warfare in Gaza:
Unearthing the Testimony
of the Land
Shourideh C. Molavi
This talk examines the historical production and ongoing maintenance of the eastern ‘border’ of the occupied Gaza Strip with Israel in the wake of the 2018 Great March of Return. Against the backdrop of over seven decades of Israeli settler-colonialism, a ‘buffer zone’ has been formed along Gaza's border with Israel through the denial of Palestinian access to agricultural lands, periodic military confrontation, the uprooting and grazing of farmlands, and the latest practice of herbicidal spraying. During the Great March, the slow violence of this gradual border production culminated in the fast killing of human bodies. Using a range of assembled practices, including visual and fieldwork methodologies, this talk will unpack the link between these forms of violence and locate the destruction of the environment and the destruction of the body in time and space. In doing so, I examine the ways in which the testimony and of the land can be documented as an archive of knowledge along the human testimony to confront the historical erasure of state crimes and expose forms of ongoing settler-colonial violence.
Shourideh C. Molavi is a writer and scholar specializing in critical state theory, migration and border studies, and trained with a background in International Humanitarian Law. She has over 15 years of academic and fieldwork experience in the Middle East — focusing on Israel/Palestine — on the politics of space, citizenship and statelessness, and human and minority rights, with an emphasis on the relationship between the law, violence and power.
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Archival Violence
Samia Henni
Samia Henni is an architectural historian and Assistant Professor of History of Architecture and Urbanism at the Department of Architecture, College of Architecture, Art and Planning, Cornell University. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (gta Verlag, 2017, EN; Editions B42, 2019, FR), the editor of War Zones, gta papers 2 (gta Verlag, 2018), and the maker of exhibitions, such as Housing Pharmacology/Right to Housing (Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020) and Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, 2017–19).
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Wastelands of Empire: Colonial Mediations of the Earth as Property
Hollyamber Kennedy
In the complex interplay between concept and technical practice, land reclamation was integral to the development of the modern territorial imagination. This was especially true for states whose overseas colonial policies were informed by internal colonial practices in domestic rural zones, as was the case with imperial Germany and, some years later, fascist Italy, whose modes of governance were shaped in fundamental ways by their Ministries of Agriculture and the rural modernization programs they instituted to “reclaim” the countryside at sites of ethno-political and class conflict. The models of development that emerged from these reconstituted “settler frontiers,” linked across time and geographies, index a historical shift in the practices of territorial imperialism, confronted by emancipation movements. This turn was distinguished by a new power over space, specifically spatial and material-technical manifestations of the nation-state, attended by new spatial understandings, that were bound indivisibly to the colonial encounter, in which the severing of traditional rights to land, the divestment and subsequent cultivation of land and body—the extraction and reclamation of raw material and labor—served as the point of departure for the production of the national self. To access the full and divergent meanings of this modern form of regeneration through violence, captured in the physical and bureaucratic process of land reclamation, is to think this history alongside the material, aesthetic, and epistemic legacies of human violence and mass displacement that were its counterpart, a retelling that requires new skills and border-crossing methodologies.
Hollyamber Kennedy is a historian of modern architecture and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. Her work explores the intersection of modern architecture, colonial science, and processes of territorialization, and her research centers the role of anti-colonial and anti-partition resistance in the shaping of the colonial built environment. She previously held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Harvard University, at the Mahindra Humanities Center, as part of a four-year project on Migration and the Humanities. Her research has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the DAAD, SAH, and CAA. Her writing has been published by Grey Room, The University of Chicago Press, Avery Review, MIT Press, and Whitechapel Gallery. She has an essay forthcoming with Aggregate that is a part of the Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration series, and a chapter in a forthcoming book edited by Itohan Osayimwese on The Architectural Legacies of German Colonialism in Africa. She is currently working on a long-term collaborative project with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi exploring concept histories of settlement. She received her PhD in Architectural History and Theory from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
14.00—15.30
(UTC +2)
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Studio: A neutral plantation? Agrocapitalist expansion and Swiss coloniality in Brazil
Denise Bertschi
In the last years, a public realization about the longue-durée implications of Switzerland in colonialism and slavery has unfolded. This lecture seeks to uproot traces and overgrown paths, forcefully forgotten or at the contrary, hyper-present for the people that lived through this violent history. As artist-researcher I revisit the plantation, in order to spatialize and give an image to signifying spaces of the plantation. Guided by the inhabitants of today’s Quilombo community Helvécia, we root out such places of memory — the former coffee plantation, the ‘casa grande’, the slave owners house, the old cemetery or the slave port — in order to undo the erasure of this chapter from Swiss history and take responsibility for its past.
The historical example of the plantation Helvécia, founded in the beginning of the 19th century, was embedded in a conglomerate of plantations run by several Swiss families as well as some Germans under the name of Colonîa Leopoldina. Indeed, these Swiss plantation owners were white settlers leaving Switzerland to the so called ‘New World’ for expanding profit on grabbed land by the empire of Brazil. As it is often mentioned, to speak about a purely individual enterprise would not be justified, as the wider colony, of which Helvécia was part of, was managed, supported, overviewed and regulated by a Swiss national consulate, founded as globally one of the first in Brazil after 1848. Concurrently, this marks a foundational nation-building moment, when Switzerland received its first Federal Constitution under the name of Confoederatio Helvetica. Therefore, a state involvement with colonialism cannot be reduced to private actors or individual companies by any means.
This analysis aims to reduce the distance to seemingly far-away places, and spatialize these terrains of colonial capitalism back to the built environment of our Swiss cities, considerably built with capital flows of surplus value extracted elsewhere. Frantz Fanon noted that “the colonial world is not only where colonizers go. It is a system that encloses city and suburb, rural and wasteland, and the roads and waterways that provide or are carved to provide transport.”
(This presentation is part of Denise Bertschi's ongoing PhD research at EPFL Lausanne, in collaboration with HEAD–Genève.)
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Round table, Q & A
Moderation: Nitin Bathla, Julien Lafontaine Carboni
Nitin Bathla is an architect and researcher pursuing Doctoral Studies at ETH Zurich. He is currently working towards his PhD entitled Delhi without borders. Nitin regularly collaborates with film-makers, artist, and civil society organisations in order to bridge the research-activism divide.
IMAGINED RECORDS AND CRITICAL FABULATIONS. RE-THREADING HISTORIES.
16.30—18.00
(UTC +2)
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The Exorbitant Struggle
Doreen Mende
How many more traces do we need to unearth from archives for evidencing that global racial capitalism is not only foundationally inscribed, but continuously maintained in those institutions claiming historical knowledge? The talk is a curatorial inquiry to begin with ourselves: It will address the structural scene of inquiry – in my case, the entanglement of the art school, the exhibition and curatorial research – as a “problem-space” (David Scott) in which the problem is not solved but mobilized as a “problem for thought” (Nahum Dimitri Chandler) to oppose complicity towards complexity. Furthermore, it will speak about micro-practices from the expanded field of art as rehearsals for “unlearning our complicity” (Ariella Aïsha Azoulay) with the macro-structures of power claiming historical knowledge, and thus, it will want to sojourn within the exorbitant struggle that emerges between the micro and the macro, in which the and between the two does neither offer a field of accumulation nor addition, but where the and makes space and time for stammering, listening, tussling, failing, confronting and socializing towards a work of research for decolonial times.
Doreen Mende is a curator, theorist, exhibition-maker, educator, associate professor of curatorial/politics and director of the Critical Curatorial Cybernetic Research Practices (CCC-RP), Master and PhD-Forum, at Visual Arts Department at HEAD Genève. Through various curatorial mobilizations, essayistic writing and academic publications, she has developed the concept of “archival metabolism” as methodology to foster a vocabulary for the geopolitics as well as chronopolitics of exhibiting practices and artmaking within a post-1989 world. She is currently Principal Investigator of Decolonizing Socialism. Entangled Internationalism, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. From 2008 to 2015, Mende has been faculty member of the Dutch Art Institute while completing her doctoral studies in Curatorial/Knowledge at Visual Cultures of Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a co-founding member of the European Forum for Advanced Practices (EFAP), a co-founding member of Multiple Artistic Mobilities at University Zurich, and a co-founding director of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin.
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The Im/possibility of a Black Swiss History
Jovita dos Santos Pinto
In dominant historiographical accounts of Switzerland and Europe, people of color are portrayed as part of a recently arrived, postcolonial immigration to the continent. This understanding is based on a colonial amnesia that has shaped political, social and scientific discourses in Switzerland for the last decades. Concurrently it has represented people and communities of color in a “static foreignness”, overriding personal and shared experiences as well as historical facts.
In my presentation, I want to ask, what happens if we willfully insist on narrating the lives and stories of these subjects deemed impossible? Based on my ongoing PhD research on historical Black female figures in Switzerland since the 1800’s, I want to inquire critical fabulation as a way to link the found fragments, discontinuities, gaps and silences into a Black Swiss History, as a willful aberration (an imagining of an otherwise) to the tales of the nation state.
Jovita dos Santos Pinto writes a dissertation on Black Women and the Swiss Public Sphere. She is the initiator of histnoire.ch – a documentation of Black Women* in the Swiss Public, and co-founder of Bla*Sh – network of Black women* and non-binary persons.
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Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work
Michelle Caswell
This talk responds to ongoing discussions about “diversifying” archives at predominantly white institutions, arguing that archivists can and should do more to disrupt white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy beyond the standard liberal solutions of more diverse collecting and more inclusive description. Grounded in the emerging field of critical archival studies, the talk will address how dominant western archival theories and practices are oppressive by design while looking toward the radical politics of community archives to envision new liberatory theories and practices. Drawing from ethnography at community archives sites in the U.S., including the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), the talk will explore how members of minoritized communities activate records to build solidarities across and within communities, trouble linear progress narratives and disrupt cycles of oppression. It will propose a new framework for understanding liberatory memory work, including its temporal, representational, and material aspects, ultimately arguing that archival disruptions in time and space should be neither about the past nor the future, but about the liberatory affects and effects of memory work in the present.
Michelle Caswell, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Archival Studies in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Caswell directs a team of students at UCLA’s Community Archives Lab, which explores the ways that independent, identity-based memory organizations document, shape, and provide access to the histories of minoritized communities, with a particular emphasis on understanding their affective, political, and artistic impact. In 2008, together with Samip Mallick, Caswell co-founded the South Asian American Digital Archive, an online repository that documents and provides access to the stories of South Asian Americans. She is the author of the books Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge Press, 2021) and Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), as well as more than 40 peer-reviewed articles in critical archival studies.
18.30—19.45
(UTC +2)
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My Body, My Archive
Studio: Faustin Linyekula
Good evening to you all, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Kabako, I am Kabako, again Kabako, forever Kabako. Kabako is my name, I am a storyteller. I have a little story for you tonight, a trip to Banataba.
Banataba is my maternal grandfather’s birthplace, a village on the banks of the River, a village in the forest, approximately 150 km South of Kisangani. But I had to go through New York City to get to Banataba.
It all began indeed with an invitation by the Metropolitan Museum in New York City to imagine a performance in one of their galleries. My first request was to see all the pieces from the Congo that are part of the Met collections.
Yes, wherever I go, I’m always searching for the Congo.
That’s for sure a senseless obsession because, to quote King Leopold II, the Congo doesn’t exist!
There’s only a river and the forest. The Congo doesn’t exist but wherever I go I keep searching for a piece of this mirror that’s been shattered by History andwhose fragments had been scattered across the world. I’m searching for a tiny little key to decipher and make sense of the ruins that I inherited from my fathers.
In the Met collections there are slightly over 100 pieces from the Congo. Amongst them a wooden statue, 83 cm high, black,white, ochre pigments, and a tag “Lengola People”.
I immediately wanted to shape the performance around this statue, despite resistance from the Met African arts curatorswho deem it insignificant. That’s why it’s been kept in storage since joining the Met collections in 1986, that’s why nobody ever bothered to research its story.
But this was the most important piece in the Museum for me, the only one that could say something about my ancestors, about who I am. Because my mother is Lengola. So was Yanga, my maternal grandfather, born in Banataba, somewhere South of Kisangani, on the banks of the River, in the forest.
Faustin Linyekula is a dancer, choreographer and storyteller who lives and works in Kisangani (Democratic Republic of Congo). He combines the strength of theatre, the expressive power of dance and a sharp political perspective as he explores post-colonial reality with courage and humour. Faustin Linyekula grew up and studied literature and theatre in Kisangani. He lived for a time in Nairobi and in 1997 co-founded the first contemporary dance company in Kenya with Opiyo Okach and Afrah Tenambergen. He returned to Kinshasa in June 2001 and set up Studios Kabako, a dance and visual theatre organisation designed as a place for interaction, research and creation. With his company, Faustin Linyekula has written some fifteen plays that have been performed on major stages and at major festivals in Europe, Africa and North and South America.
Faustin Linyekula has also designed performances for museums, for instance in New York at MOMA in 2012 and the Metropolitan Musem en 2017, and in Marseille at the Mucem in 2016. Other collaborations include a production for the Comédie Française (Bérénice, 2009), a show for the Ballet de Lorraine (La Création du monde 1923-2012) and a solo for a dancer from the CNB - Ballet National du Portugal (2016). Faustin Linyekula regularly teaches in Africa, in the United States and in Europe.
In 2007 he was awarded the Grand Prix by the Prince Claus Foundation for culture and development. In 2016, Faustin Linyekula was associated artist for the City of Lisbon and was awarded the city’s medal of cultural merit. In 2014, Faustin and Studios Kabako were awarded first prize by the CurryStone Foundation in the United States for the work carried out in Kisangani. In 2019, Faustin was associated artist at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam, and was winner of the Tallberg-Eliasson Global Leadership Award.
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Round table, Q & A
Moderation:
Stéphanie Ginalski
Coming soon
SAT 29 MAY
Neuchâtel
LANDSCAPE OF MEMORY. MATERIAL AND SYMBOLICAL TRACES OF COLONIALISM.
09.30—12.30
(UTC +2)
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Welcoming at CAN, Centre d'Art de Neuchâtel
Denise Bertschi,
Julien Lafontaine Carboni
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City walk on the colonial architectural traces
Izabel Barros
Izabel Barros (São Paulo/Piauí, BR), Program responsible for feminist peace Policy at the cfd, intersectional feminist and human rights activist in Brazil and Switzerland. Graduated in History and Sociology, member of the collectives Taoca and Berner Rassismus Stammtisch. Both in her historiographic work and in her engagement as an activist, Izabel seeks to question power relations and promotes transdisciplinary cultural and global collaborations with an anti-colonial proposal. Between 2013 and 2020 she was responsible for different projects in Brazil and scientific contributor at the Cooperaxionfoundation. She is involved in the defense of self-determination and the demarcation of the ancestral territories of indigenous communities and quilombolas in the state of Maranhão. She accompanies and collaborates in several artistic projects in Switzerland: the podcast Wie die Geranium nach Bern verschleppt wurde with Denis Schwabenland (2020); Experi Theater, C*Walk and Black Box (2020–2021); partnership with the artist Laura Kalauz at Bone Festival in Bern (2020) and the project WeTalk.
INDIVIDUAL AND
COLLECTIVE
INVESTIGATION IN THE
URBAN LANDSCAPE
OF NEUCHÂTEL AND IN
ITS INSTITUTIONS
14.00—16.00
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Individual research
Moderation:
Yves Pedrazzini
Coming soon
16.30—18.30
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Studio
Abdessamad El Montassir
Abdessamad El Montassir is a multi-disciplinary artist, his research is centered on a trilogy: the right to forget, fictional and visceral narratives, and the trauma of anticipation.
In his body of work and research, the artist sets reflexive processes that invite us to rethink history and cartographies through collective or fictional narratives and immaterial archives.
His projects also question traumas and their impacts on individuals, their behavior and their socio-political evolution, and reveal processes where these traumas serve to historization. Abdessamad El Montassir tackles these problematics while taking into consideration the knowledge on non-human identities -plants- in order to ignite the emergence of renewed manners to think our environments.
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Round table, Q & A
with guests from Neuchâtel
at: Académie de Meuron, Quai Philippe Godet, 2000 Neuchâtel (not a public event)
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End of conference
REGISTRATION FOR DOCTORAL STUDENTS
As a Swiss doctoral student, you can subscribe to the doctoral course Unearthing Traces for either 2 days (online conference on zoom) or 3 days (2 days online conference on zoom and 1 day fieldwork in Neuchâtel). We encourage doctoral students to take part to the full course and we treat these registrations with priority.
More infos on the course
Full course: 3 ECTS
2 days (27—28 May 2021) on zoom
1 day (29 May 2021) in Neuchâtel
Food and travel costs are covered by swissuniversities.
Registration
Short course: 2 ECTS
2 days (27—28 May 2021) on zoom
Registration
REGISTRATION FOR EXTERNAL LISTENERS
The conference Unearthing Traces (27—28 May 2021) held on zoom is free of charge. Please register now and we will send you further information closer to date (zoom link, etc). Thank you for registering.
Registration