By : Denise Bertschi
Beginning of the dissertation : 1.03.2018
End of the dissertation : 27.06.2024
Co-direction: Prof. Doreen Mende (HEAD – Genève), Prof. Nicola Braghieri (EDAR/EPFL)
Public defense will take place on June 27, 2024 at 6pm at EPFL Lausanne
Room CO 3 or join in visio on zoom https://epfl.zoom.us/j/66914545682?pwd=waRO4Lhd8l0OvwI8PEmlr8VIb9ZXP9.1
The presentation will be followed by an informal apéro
Read the article published by EPFL NEWS
Informed by longstanding artistic practice, this doctoral thesis approaches entanglements of Swiss coloniality in Brazil and Switzerland under the lens of land, archive and visuality. The enduring legacies of imperial capitalism 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 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 thesis 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.
While previous research on Swiss „colonialism without colonies“ was mostly shaped by global historians, this project pioneers adding a visual culture‘s lens paired with a spatial analysis, which echoes not only the past but the present. Three parts, structured by the type of source they are informed by (official archives, visual traces, territorial investigation paired with oral history), lead the reader through the longue-durée of Swiss coloniality between Brazil and Switzerland in one space-time. This doctoral thesis is accompanied by a rich visual corpus from archival images to artistic works, all equally crucial to the knowledge production process.