in the exhibition “Technoshamanism”, HMKV at Dortmunder U, 9 October 2021 – 6 March 2022, photo: Jannis Wiebusch
Hek Basel 2020, double screen Foto: Gina Folly
Swiss Psychotropic Gold_Molecular Refinery; digitial video, 17min02; 2020 (Pax Art Award Basel)
Up to 70% of gold which is traded worldwide passes through Swiss refineries. However, this happens largely unseen and unnoticed by a wider public. Not only that, it is a centuries-long history of Swiss commodity trade being caught up in colonial, and later postcolonial entanglements which remains largely obscured by public debate. The Swiss mythology of neutrality transforms the often violent and “dirty” material complexities of mining and trading into an opaque and orderly form of technocracy, discretion and virtual finance. At the same time, by being instrumental for early modern industrialization as well as contemporary finance, Swiss trading activities have influenced vivid cultural, affective and moral economies. They have contributed to Swiss wealth, but also to national narratives of independence, safety and white supremacy.
Swiss Psychotropic Gold together with its entanglements and metabolisms serves as starting point in order to track down the elusive and often invisible paths of molecules, affects and violence.
Swiss Psychotropic Gold – abstract sex and molecular joy
Centre Culturel Suisse Paris, December 12, 2019
Performance with Gabriel Flückiger, meditation on pure gold
Swiss Psychotropic Gold, ed. knowbotiq, Nina Bandi, Merian Verlag Basel, 2020 with contributions by Adji Dieye, Nina Bandi, Elke Bippus, Yolanda Ariadne Collins, Fundaçion Mareia, Gitanjali Dang, Anna Frei, Ayesha Hameed, Rohit Jain, knowbotiq, Angela Melitopoulos/Angela Anderson, Margarida Mendes, Johannes Paul Raether, Gerald Raunig, Jordy Rosenberg, Christoph Schenker, Jakob Tanner, Ira Terzol jr, Füsun Türetken, Yvonne Volkart >>go to BOOK WEBSITE with PREVIEW
THE SWISS PSYCHOTROPIC GOLD REFINING
what is your mission?
Corner College, 10 September – 8 October 2017
focuses on the moments when gold loses its stable form, in moments of dissipation and dispersion, when its materiality is transformed into other states that we subsume under its derivative, psychotropic and molecular agencies. In order to go beyond ‘gold’ and trace its different materialities, we follow its derivatives. Leaving the river, spilling over in different directions, in uncontrollable flows and streams. Derivatives contain bodies, flesh involved in gold production and usage—from exploitative labor, poisoned environments to gold as object of desire. What is the spillover that is channeled to refineries on the Swiss borders where it is mixed, melted, and neutralized to the extent that its different origins are not traceable anymore?
The derivatives of gold might give way to a different sociality. But how does gold—in violent acts of extraction as well as in its dimensions of cleanliness and in providing moral superiority act as a dividing and transformative force of world-making?
Liberated from their histories, molecules of gold transform from violence into virtuality, into Swissness. The molecular implies knotted trajectories and transversal relations, allowing for divisions and re-aggregations that run counter to hegemonic categories. Matter and molecules are not political per se. It is not via the contraction and downscaling of systems, hierarchies and totalities to the molecular level that we arrive at its political meaning. Molecules have to be enacted as part of the historical and the social.
Entering the Psychotropic Refinery—your techno-libidinous bodies have become molecular bodies through which psychotropic substances, hormones and desires enter and disperse. Gold driven by logistical protocols and immediated by ghosts turns into a stabilizer and tranquilizer, a security, an energizer, an aesthetic part-taking:
Psychotropic Refinery—encountering a sociality of reciprocal indebtedness dispersed in space and time.
Opening: Sunday, 10 September, 18h-20h
different performative settings and healings of post-/colonial amnesia:
DJ Fred Hystère and Nina Bandi (molecular listening session),
Martina Buzzi (golden acupuncture/charming the ghost points) and
Gabriel Flückiger (meditation on pure gold)
Thursday, 14 September ;Workshop trans-shine with Gabriel Flückiger: 18h-20h, registration required
Conversation between Rohit Jain and knowbotiq: Swiss Psychotropic Gold and latent archives (in German), 20h
Swiss Psychotropic Gold: Delinking Commodity Trading
Rohstoffwechsel – Performative installation in an empty Office Building of Zurich West
knowbotiq in collaboration with Fred Hystère (sound exchange), Tanja Quirici (gold acupuncture), Teresa Vittucci (body and movement), Alper Yacioglu (set-up), with the support of Nina Bandi and Rohit Jain at DRAFT Zurich July 28–30, 2016
Part of DRAFT Beijing, Cairo, Cape Town, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Mumbai, St. Petersburg and Zurich June 2015–July 2016
Collaborators: CAMP, Khanabadosh/Gitanjali Dang, Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty (Bombay); Beirut/Sarah Rifky and Jens Maier-Rothe, Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk, Alia Mossallam (Cairo); Chimurenga, Riason Naidoo, Jay Pather, Richard Pithouse (Cape Town); Sophie Goltz, Alice Peragine, Christoph Schäfer (Hamburg); Giorgio Biancorosso, Para Site/Cosmin Costinas and Qinyi Lim, Samson Young (Hong Kong); Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Teatro Ojo (Mexico City); Ju Anqi, Li Zhenhua, Iris Long (Shanghai); Chto Delat (St. Petersburg); IFCAR/Christoph Schenker, Nina Bandi, Rohit Jain, knowbotiq (Zurich)
More information on Draft can be found here: draftprojects.info
re-assembler
Swiss Psychotropic Gold: Delinking Commodity Trading Rohstoffwechsel – Performative installation in an empty Office Building of Zurich West
knowbotiq in collaboration with Fred Hystère (sound exchange), Tanja Quirici (gold acupuncture), Teresa Vittucci (body and movement), Alper Yacioglu (set-up), with the support of Nina Bandi and Rohit Jain at DRAFT Zurich July 28–30, 2016
For more than three centuries, Swiss commodity trade has been caught up in colonial, and later in postcolonial and neoliberal entanglements. Having fuelled early modern industrialisation, as well as contemporary finance, Swiss trading has influenced vivid cultural, affective and moral economies. It has contributed to Swiss wealth, but also to national narratives of independence, safety and white supremacy. Yet, public debate on colonial involvement is almost absent. The Swiss mythology of neutrality transforms the often violent and “dirty” material complexities of mining and trading into an opaque and orderly form of technocracy, discretion and virtual finance. An artistic and ethnographic project, Swiss Psychotropic Gold re-narrates gold trade—from mining in former colonies to its refining in Switzerland and its re-dispersion into global contexts—as a series of divisions and transformations of primary materials, values and affects.
In their performative intervention, knowbotiq critically fabulates about how molecular, psychotropic and derivative materialities of gold invisibly fuel Swiss subjectivities, debates and public spaces. From volatile non-presence to solid states and derivatives, from probabilities and micro trading to quants and contingence, from desire and testosterone to options and futures and fungibility. The project inquires into the postcolonial amnesia and bravado that informs Swiss innocence and righteousness. It is an impossible story of racism, pharmacological remedies, misogyny, poisonous effects and delirious states of un-knowing.
txt>> swiss psychotropic gold, a critical fabulation nina bandi, knowbotiq
DRAFT Beijing, Cairo, Cape Town, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Mumbai, St. Petersburg and Zurich June 2015–July 2016
Collaborators: CAMP, Khanabadosh/Gitanjali Dang, Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty (Bombay); Beirut/Sarah Rifky and Jens Maier-Rothe, Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk, Alia Mossallam (Cairo); Chimurenga, Riason Naidoo, Jay Pather, Richard Pithouse (Cape Town); Sophie Goltz, Alice Peragine, Christoph Schäfer (Hamburg); Giorgio Biancorosso, Para Site/Cosmin Costinas and Qinyi Lim, Samson Young (Hong Kong); Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Teatro Ojo (Mexico City); Ju Anqi, Li Zhenhua, Iris Long (Shanghai); Chto Delat (St. Petersburg); IFCAR/Christoph Schenker, Nina Bandi, Rohit Jain, knowbotiq (Zurich)
More information on Draft can be found here: draftprojects.info
Decanonizing the University
29/30. Juni, jeweils 12h30 -14h
Performance an der Fassade das Kollegienhauses der Uni Basel
knowbotiq with Martina Buzzi and Gabriel Flückiger
A Piece of Street, curated by Kadiatou Diallo
CALL FOR GOLD @7th European Conference on African Studies , Basel June 29th/30th, 2017
A video call during the 7th European African Studies Conference calls for personal gold and jewelery in Basel. The Gold shall be brought to the big mosaic “The Mission” by Walter Eglin (1939 – 46) at the the conference center, the Kollegienhaus at Petersplatz, to refine it psychotropically.The Personal Gold is to be freed from its calvinistic invisibility and postcolonial amnesia.
The Psychotropic Gold Refining stimulates the body of the participants at the 7th European African Studies Conference with Golden Acupuncture, meditations on pure gold, and evaporations of Golden Viagra towards molecular and aphrodisiac transformations. In addition, a visual intervention on the large mosaic of Walter Eglin (1939 – 46) takes place on the façade of the Kollegienhauses of the Basel University. The boys are sent by their mothers out of the innocence of the Swiss landscape to university, in order to receive their philantropic initiation through knowledge and aesthetics. This intervention affects the canonized incarnation, the “Mission” of male, white boys with the libidinal commodity trading of gold.
29/30. Juni, jeweils 12h30 -14h
Performance an der Fassade das Kollegienhauses der Uni Basel
knowbotiq with Martina Buzzi and Gabriel Flückiger
A Piece of Street, curated by Kadiatou Diallo
download txt: Swiss Psychotropic Gold, a critical fabulation
- Gold refineries Switzerland, field recording July 2016