November 27, 2021 at 5:00 p.m.
Discussion in French with Denise Bertschi and Danaé Panchaud
Free admission
Covid certificate mandatory
Denise Bertschi, artist, in conversation with Danaé Panchaud, new director of the CPG, on the occasion of the publication of STATE FICTION. The Gaze of the Swiss Neutral Mission In the Korean Demilitarized Zone by Denise Bertschi, published in 2021 by the Centre de la photographie Genève.
In STATE FICTION, the Swiss photographer and researcher Denise Bertschi looks at how Switzerland's neutral mission in the Korean demilitarized zone contributed to the construction of the Swiss “neutral” national identity. Offering new perspectives in terms of geopolitical, military, and sociological histories of the twentieth century, Denise Bertschi takes her readers through elements of archival photographic and cinematographic artefacts left behind by the Swiss military men. Indeed, Denise Bertschi’s meticulous discussions of the archival material reveal how the Swiss soldiers and senior officers stationed in Korea on a "neutral" mission, which began in 1953 and is still going on today, contributed extensively to the very construction of representations of Swiss “neutrality”, unveiling the mechanisms behind this particular STATE FICTION.
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Denise Bertschi is interested in cracked appearances, offbeat representations of reality, and gaps in historiography. His work seeks to make visible the links between Switzerland and global geopolitics. In doing so, she traces the Swiss colonial implications and ambiguous financial relations, she questions the narratives of the national imagination such as that of neutrality. With the tools of the historian, anthropologist or investigative journalist, she creates installations and videos in [...]
Denise Bertschi is interested in cracked appearances, offbeat representations of reality, and gaps in historiography. His work seeks to make visible the links between Switzerland and global geopolitics. In doing so, she traces the Swiss colonial implications and ambiguous financial relations, she questions the narratives of the national imagination such as that of neutrality. With the tools of the historian, anthropologist or investigative journalist, she creates installations and videos in which archival documents and personal images are interwoven, the words of people she has met and her own investigation route.
