CONFIDENTIAL
The 3-screen video installation Confidential is a component of the artist’s series titled Neutrality as an Agent, collated and produced over the course of Bertschi’s numerous trips to South Africa to research the role played by Switzerland in Apartheid South Africa.
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PROJECT DESCRIPTION
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To get to the bottom of the story, Denise Bertschi took up research at the National Archives of South Africa, among other places, and there discovered two archive boxes with correspondence from the 1950s concerning the gold trade dealings of the Société de banque suisse (SBS; now UBS). She thereupon chose to pay a personal visit to the site of these transactions. The video Confidential (2018) thus constitutes a cartography of six buildings in Pretoria or in Johannesburg’s former Central Business District (CBD), which at the time of the veritable “goldrush” seemed destined to become an entirely white “African New York City.” We glimpse glass and concrete facades, and the old signs of businesses that have long since relocated or been abandoned for good—but above all, we sense the striking absence of a history carefully buried behind the official version of the past.
The work is a part of the artists’ complex work series Neutrality as an Agent collated in this case in the course of Denise Bertschi’s numerous trips to South Africa. Drawing on archives, architecture, the urban fabric, and local production of vernacular images, she first brought to light traces of history and delved into the self-serving ways neutrality is put to use. She pursued artistic research in a variety of media, from video and photography to collage; and not least in her acclaimed publication, We say we are fine. They say we are not, which was listed in The Most Beautiful Swiss Books Award 2019.
The work is a part of the artists’ complex work series Neutrality as an Agent collated in this case in the course of Denise Bertschi’s numerous trips to South Africa. Drawing on archives, architecture, the urban fabric, and local production of vernacular images, she first brought to light traces of history and delved into the self-serving ways neutrality is put to use. She pursued artistic research in a variety of media, from video and photography to collage; and not least in her acclaimed publication, We say we are fine. They say we are not, which was listed in The Most Beautiful Swiss Books Award 2019.
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3-screen video installation with soundtrack, 10 min.
6 framed archival documents,
2018
6 framed archival documents,
2018
installation images
