SASHA HUBER'S RENTYHORN
12.6.2017, Third Text Journal, online
Dr. Janice Cheddie wrote a thorough article for the Third Text Journal about my Rentyhorn project titled: Sasha Huber's Rentyhorn - Challenging Political Race-less-ness in Switzerland. Link
Sasha Huber's Rentyhorn - Challenging Political Race-less-ness in Switzerland
ABSTRACT: Sasha Huber's Rentyhorn (2008), Switzerland, was a component of the Swiss Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign. The campaign sought to rename Agassizhorn, a peak bearing the name of Swiss-born scientist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) a proponent of scientific racism. The article examines Rentyhorn, an intervention, by the Swiss/Haitian artist Huber (b 1975, Zurich), through concepts of re-mapping. Within Rentyhorn, the Swiss landscape is exposed through the naturalised systems of knowledge (geological mapping), making visible unacknowledged histories (Agassiz's legacy), and marginalised perspectives (postcolonial critique) within a geographical terrain. Positioning Rentyhorn as a critique of Swiss official ‘memory’ of Agassiz, as an esteemed scientist, highlighting how the processes of historical amnesia on Agassiz's role in the formation of racist theories, are a symptom of a wider societal disavowal of Swiss engagement with the colonial project. Challenging Agassiz's presence in the Swiss landscape emerges as a nexus of critical debate, visual and political activism.