The Swiss mountain with a racist name and the artist fighting to rename it | Art

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In August 2008, Sasha Huber landed by helicopter near the top of the Agassizhorn mountain in Switzerland. She carried a metal plate which she hammered into the ice, symbolically renaming the mountain Rentyhorn in honor of a Congolese-born slave, Renty Taylor, who had spent most of his life in captivity on a plantation of the US state of South Carolina. As an artist, says Huber, I wanted to investigate Switzerland’s involvement in the slave trade, because no one told us that story.

The year before, Huber had joined a committee of activists, historians, and artists involved in a campaign called Demounting Louis Agassiz. Their goal was to remove the name of the eminent 19th-century Swiss geologist and glaciologist not just from the mountain, but from the many sites around the world that honor him. As such, their actions foreshadowed the widespread questioning of historic monuments, sites and statues that accompanied the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. In 2015, Huber discovered that a statue of Agassiz at the Stanford University had been knocked down in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She then created three protest posters based on photographs of the toppled statue, to denounce police brutality against black people and call for the removal of statues that honor figures linked to racism.

Agassiz has around 80 places named after him around the world and even some on the moon and Mars

Huber had been invited to the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign committee by left-wing Swiss activist and historian Hans Fssler, who was the first person to break the silence on Agassiz’s lesser-known role as a leading proponent of nineteenth-century scientific racism. century. A creationist, Agassiz believed that God deliberately created black people as an inferior species, a view he expressed tirelessly during several lecture tours in America. He also advocated racial segregation and called for urgent legislation to prevent by all means the procreation of mixed race which he said would dilute the purity of the white race. His antipathy for people of color, expressed in his personal correspondence as well as in his public appearances, borders on a kind of mania.

Extreme Agassiz believed that God created black people as an inferior species. Photography: Universal Images Group North America/Alamy

Many people would say he was simply a product of his time, says Huber, who is of Swiss and Haitian descent. But even by [those] standards, he was extreme. Many of the things he said about race were echoed a century later by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. And yet, Agassiz has about 80 places named after him around the world. He even has sites named after him on the moon and on Mars. As I got to know him, I felt that as an artist I had to do more. Placing the plaque on his mountain and creating a visual record of the action was a starting point. It kind of made the possibility that he was actually renamed more real.

As a new exhibition at the Autograph Gallery in London makes clear, Agassiz has since occupied a prominent place in Hubers’ creative imagination. Titled You Name It, the exhibition features photographs, films, texts, performances and historical images, distilling 15 years of her trying to heal the wounds of colonialism by appropriating the legacy of a scientist still held in high esteem in Switzerland.

The exceptions are two new pieces specially commissioned for the Autograph exhibition, one of which was made in memory of Khadija Saye, a Gambian-born photographer who was born in London and died in the Grenfell Tower fire. Huber used a digital print of one of Sayes’ tinplate self-portraits. The originals, which were made during a workshop at Autograph, were destroyed in the fire. By printing it on burnt wood and recreating her dress in staples, Huber created an effect akin to an enhanced photographic negative. Even though I didn’t know Khadija, I was very disturbed when she died, says Huber. I wanted to remember her through a portrait.

The exhibition includes a video of her descending by helicopter to the summit of the Agissizhorn to lay the plaque in honor of Renty, as well as a selection of the letters she sent to the mayors of the two Swiss cantons and the three municipalities bordering the Mountain. All mayors must say yes for the mountain to be renowned, she said. But only one responded, saying he needed to know more about the campaign.

The exhibit also includes Hubers portraits of Renty Taylor and his daughter Delia, from his most recent series Tailoring Freedom. These are based on daguerreotypes of slaves that were commissioned by Agassiz in 1850 and created by a photographer called JT Zealy. The originals were donated to the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnography at Harvard University by Agassiz’s son, in recognition of his father’s time there as a professor and founder of the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Recovered portraits of Hubers de Renty and Delia Taylor. Photo: Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology/Sasha Huber

Renty and Delia were among several people selected by Agassiz for anthropological examination and forced to stand naked for Zealys’s camera. In the original daguerreotypes, they are, in Huber’s words, stripped naked, dehumanized and stripped of their dignity. In response, she has reproduced these portraits, printed them on wood, and dressed them in what looks like lace trimmings, but they are actually intricately patterned metallic seams that she has painstakingly created by hand. using an air pressure stapler. It looks like a weapon and actually looks like a gun, she said. So in that sense, it’s very loaded.

Huber first used the stapling process to do work that helped her come to terms with her own Haitian ancestry. I saw it as a way to kind of get back into the story. I wanted to engage with people whose voices had been silenced by colonialism. For me, stapling has become a suture of colonial wounds.

Despite the violence implicit in the process, his reimagined portraits of Renty and Delia are delicately crafted and incredibly resonant acts of recovery and restoration. Renty is dressed in a costume inspired by a famous portrait of Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist and social reformer who became the most photographed American of the 19th century. Delia is dressed as a tribute to Harriet Tubman who, like Douglass, was born into slavery before becoming a fearless abolitionist and anti-slavery activist. In a way, Huber says of the resulting portraits, their clothes become their armor.

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Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertisements and content funded by third parties. For more information, see our privacy policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. A triptych made by Huber at Agassiz Island in Ontario, Canada. Photography: Photography commissioned by Daniel Ehrenworth.

Huber’s work is dense with meaning and allusion, both contemporary and historical, and the catalog that accompanies the exhibition includes penetrating essays by academic heavyweights such as Paul Gilroy and Ariella Azoulay. Yet, as the documentation that is a crucial part of her practice attests, Huber is an artist whose interventions are essentially political rather than conceptual, undertaken in the hope of triggering real change.

So far, however, the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign has not led to the mountain being renamed. But, after hearing about it, Tamara Lanier, Renty’s great-great-great-granddaughter, traveled with her daughters to Switzerland from the United States to meet the artist. Huber then gifted the portraits of Renty and Delia to the Lanier family.

In 2017, Lanier filed a lawsuit against Harvard University over ownership of the original daguerreotypes, which were taken without the subjects’ approval. In June of this year, a Massachusetts court ruled against her, but also found that Harvard’s continued use and reproduction of the images could be considered a reckless infliction of emotional distress, allowing Lanier to sue. civil action against Harvard.

Thus, the posthumous fates of the eminent scientist and the enslaved father and daughter whom Agassiz considered mere objects of his pseudo-scientific curiosity remain inextricably linked, just as their respective tales remain unfinished. In Huber’s complex and challenging art, however, an abiding sense of restorative justice prevails.

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