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 commodity trading activities have influenced vivid cultural, affective and moral economies. They have contributed to Swiss wealth, but also to national narratives of independence, neutrality, 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 orderly form of technocracy, discretion and virtual finance.
As an artistic and ethnographic project, Swiss Psychotropic Gold re-narrates global gold trade— from mining in former colonies to its refining and re-diverting in and out of Switzerland—as a series of transformative im/mediations of primary materials, values and affects.
More than 50% of global gold refining per year takes place in Switzerland (including gold which was appropriated during the recent commodity wars in Central Africa). In the 1970s Switzerland traded and refined 75% of South African gold and saved the Apartheid regime from an existential economic crisis. And, Switzerland was an important gold trader for Nazi Germany and the allies in the Second World War. These examples mark how, in recent history, Switzerland has fashioned itself as a political and economic hotspot for neutralizing the origin of gold. Gold is quasi alchmestically cleaned of its violent and physical history and transformed into an ephemeral symbol of power, status and purity – into condensed wealth.
In this state of postcolonial amnesia, it is not through enlightenment and rational acting that truth becomes automatically visible. We propose that it is at the affective, moral and aesthetic texture of the publics where criticism and subversion are blocked. Just breathe the air in this space, where we are. Feel the smartness, cleanliness and the wealth. A well planned, ordered, shiny and opaque surface of neutrality and perfection. What does it take to keep up such a public display of wealth? Which histories and stories are visible, which are made invisible?
We are interested in understanding and opening up such a smart postcolonial public, which diffuses the visible against the invisible, the righteous versus the dubious and the clean versus the dirty, the refined versus the raw. We try to explore strategies of fabulating, un-representing, incorporating, affecting and acting within the powerful but suppressed and overwritten translocal connections between the Swiss publics and the psychotropic metabolism of gold.
The story concerning gold that has been researched and worked upon more widely – albeit only in recent years with regard to Switzerland – is the story of bullion making and bullion storage as well as of jewellery, both of which are characterized by a specific material visibility. However, Swiss Psychotropic Gold rather focuses on the moment when gold loses its stable form, in moments of dissipation and dispersion, when its materiality is transformed into other states. This we subsume under its derivative, psychotropic and molecular dimensions.
In order to go beyond the material gold and to trace its different materialities, we propose to follow its derivative line. The derivative is that which leaves the riverbed and overflows its shores – this is the etymological root of the word: de-river. It is an exceeding of the banks of the river – the water spills over in different directions, in uncontrollable flows and streams.
It contains bodies and bodily processes involved in gold production and usage – from exploitative labour to gold as object of desire and consumption – as well as the different ways of movement, transformation and exchange of the commodity and of the bodies that are part of gold production.
We ask: what is it that spills over from gold that is transported to Switzerland? From this gold, which was extracted in processes of exploitation and destruction and stems from jewellery not deemed worthy to be kept any longer; from this gold which is fueled into one of the five refineries placed on Swiss territory, where it is mixed, melted, and cleaned to the extent that its different origins are not traceable anymore.
Consequently we search for aesthetic configurations that bring these derivative states of gold to the fore. Swiss refineries molecularise gold and neutralize its origins. Liberated from its histories and aggregations, molecules of gold start to transform from violence into virtuality. The molecular implies taking into account different trajectories. It means questioning established categories of causality, agency, space, time, and matter and asking, how these are tied to moral and political assumptions by the Swiss myth of humanitarianism, democracy and neutrality.
The techno-libidinous body today has become a molecular body through which substances, desires, and affects enter and disperse. Gold as a material-discursive metabolism involves bodies, technology, aesthetics, psychotropic substances, hormones, which all fuel the affective assemblage that surround and permeate gold. From drugged miners and psychotropic traders to the matrilinear handing-over of crafted and chasing gold, to a generalized desire for stability and safety tied to gold. In a somatic-political consciousness, gold becomes an affective state, an investment, a stabilizer and tranquilizer, a security, an energizer, like a golden needle used in acupuncture.
How does the opaque and unacknowledged omnipresence of gold (in Switzerland) affect postcolonial public spaces? Gold is omnipresent, but not visible. It is psychotropically active, but physically, aesthetically, and morally silent. The age-old alchemistic promise of ethernal youth has transformed into the discrete but hyperactive façade of wealth, righteousness, and smartness.
Taking into account the different discursive materialities laid out here, gold is an aesthetic part-taking, a being affected, and affecting others, that takes place on derivative, psychotropic and molecular levels. “Swiss Psychotropic Gold” affects the postcolonial archives both affectively and ethically. It alludes to the hopeful acknowledgement of violence and suffering and a politics of reparation in the present. The emanating sociality we look for is a sociality of mutual indebtedness, of dispersions in spacetimematterings, and of a different molecular, derivative and psychotropic aesthetics.