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SUMMARY:Public PhD Defense "Echoing Swiss Coloniality. Land\, Archive and 
 Visuality between Brazil and Switzerland"
DTSTART:20240627T180000
DTEND:20240627T190000
DTSTAMP:20260919T022934Z
UID:868ce3fb4973c990e720121d585767d1b832a5d37afe9659539b6567
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Denise Bertschi\nDoctoral public defense of Denise Bertschi\nE
 PFL Arts of Sciences Laboratory (LAPIS\, Prof. Nicola Braghieri) in colla
 boration with HEAD–Genève (Prof. Doreen Mende)\n\nInformed by longstand
 ing artistic practice\, this doctoral thesis approaches entanglements of S
 wiss coloniality in Brazil and Switzerland under the lens of land\, archiv
 e and visuality. The enduring legacies of imperial capitalism in the forme
 r Colônia Leopoldina (1818–1894) in Northeastern Brazil was heavily sha
 ped 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 i
 s echoed in the contemporary condition of Helvécia\, a Quilombo community
  of descendants from Colônia Leopoldina‘s enslaved African Brazilians a
 nd today‘s orbiting megastructure of eucalyptus plantations. Violent mem
 ories 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.\nRepresented and pro
 tected by a Swiss national consulate placed on the colony in the mid 19th-
 century in a crucial moment of Swiss nation-building\, when the Confoedera
 tio Helvetica received its first modern constitution\, this research demon
 strates 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 coloni
 al history with a precise in-situ case study between Bahia in Brazil and N
 euchâtel 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 en
 tangled territories is urgently necessary not only to understand the ecolo
 gical ruination in the plantation but to introduce another way of reading 
 the Swiss landscape shaped by colonialism and slavery.\nWhile previous res
 earch on Swiss „colonialism without colonies“ was mostly shaped by glo
 bal historians\, this project pioneers adding a visual culture‘s lens pa
 ired with a spatial analysis\, which echoes not only the past but the pres
 ent. 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 colonia
 lity between Brazil and Switzerland in one space-time. This doctoral thesi
 s is accompanied by a rich visual corpus from archival images to artistic 
 works\, all equally crucial to the knowledge production process.
LOCATION:CO 3 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==CO%203
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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