Joint artistic research, between Switzerland and Brazil, around ideas of consumption and exhaustion, the legacies of colonialist expropriation and its monocultural ideologies, besides the infrastructures of export and displacement, across both countries and their intertwined historie.
This volume by Denise Bertschi and Pedro Zylbersztajn is a companion to a short film of the same name, mainly filmed at Parque das Neblinas, a bewilder former eucalyptus farm in the State of São Paulo, Brazil, owned by Suzano and ran by their Ecofuturo Institute, and presented for the first time at CAN Centre d'art Neuchâtel in September 2024. Both of the two artists are interested (each in their own way) in ideas of consumption and exhaustion; knowledge and nourishment; informational and (im)productive monocultures; and infrastructures of export and displacement, as the present themselves across their countries (Brazil and Switzerland) and their intertwined histories. This volume condenses some of the 18 months or so of their common practice.
Along with stills and a unabridged version of the essay which runs trough the video, Denise Bertschi and Pedro Zylbersztajn have also invited a group of artists to contribute texts which relate in one way or another to the scope of their research – charing the hope to fertilise the drained soils of colonially extracted landscapes to give way to fertile ground for new imagineries. These contributors are Aline Motta, Daniel Frota de Abreu, Jandir JR., Walla Capelobo and Zainabu Jallo.
Denise Bertschi (born 1983 in Aarau, lives and works in Lausanne, Switzerland) is an artist-researche, working at the intersection of art, history and cultural memory. International exhibition activities and research took her to Brasil, South Africa and Korea, places of geopolitical entanglements that she weaves into Swiss historiographical memory and questions them on coloniality. Denise Bertschi's investigative practice translates into academic, as well as artistic forms through the use of media such as film, photography or installations.
Pedro Zylbersztajn (born 1993 in São Paulo) is a Brazilian artist investigating the circular relationship between language, image, protocols of everydayness, technology, and power dynamics.
