INTERVIEW //History Is the Present: In Conversation with Sasha Huber

Sure. You probably saw my work at Autograph in London. It is a touring exhibition called ‘You Name It.’ Gaëtane Verna, the former director of The Power Plant, initiated this idea of making a tour and then a book about my project, which I started in 2008.

A few years earlier, I had met Swiss historian and activist Hans Fässler, who wrote the book Reise in Schwarz-Weiss (Travels in Black and White) about Switzerland’s involvement in slavery and the slave trade. I didn’t know anything about the topic at the time; many important things are not taught at school. This book really moved me. I contacted him, and then we met in 2006. I could tell him about my artwork that relates to Haiti, and his interest in Haiti was also seen in the book because there were links between Haiti and Switzerland. By 2007, he founded Demounting Louis Agassiz, a cultural activist campaign, and he invited me to be on the committee of people from different professions, from cultural workers to journalists, historians, artists and so forth. He had this idea because Louis Agassiz’s 200th birthday was celebrated in 2007. He noticed that in exhibitions and communications about Agassiz, there was a gap.

Agassiz was born in 1807 in Switzerland, the son of a pastor. He studied to be a doctor, but then he became a glaciologist and ichthyologist, specialising in fossils, fish, and glaciers. He was a proponent of the Ice Age theory, which he didn’t invent, but he made it sound like his invention. This is the reason why there are 80 places named after him around the world and on the Moon and Mars. There are also seven species that carry his name. Before he was known, he named a mountain in the Swiss Alps after himself during a hike with his colleagues in the area.

In 1846, he was invited to the United States. Harvard University was his host, and he was leading a lecture series throughout the country. He ended up staying there. In the States, he saw Black people for the first time and became one of the most influential racists of the nineteenth century. In 1850, he used the then-new technology of photography to document enslaved people on a South Carolina plantation. It was the first time photography was used in an attempt to ‘prove’ the inferiority of Black people. This aspect of his life was completely left out when his birthday was celebrated in 2007.

The idea of the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign was to rename the mountain in the Swiss Alps that Agassiz named after himself, to one of the people he commissioned to be photographed. That person’s name was Renty, and he was from the Congo: the mountain would be renamed from Agassizhorn to Rentyhorn. It was a way of honouring Renty and everybody who experienced similar fates, those who became enslaved, who were kidnapped and forced into this huge disaster. I started to feel that I would like to do more than just give my name to support this idea. It is a long-term effort, and the mountain is still not renamed. But for me, it was the first time I felt that I needed to leave the studio. I had to go out. I had to take action.

And that’s how I had the idea to go to that mountain to rename it physically. I designed a sign with the new name, and then I went to the mountain and placed it on the peak. My mountain climbing wasn’t good enough, so I hired a helicopter. I also started the petition website http://www.rentyhorn.ch, which is still online. It has become an archive because many people left comments saying why they think renaming this mountain is important. This project was the first time I was confronted with the topic of renaming in my practice.

First, taking the liberty to name nature is already a colonial act, and to rename is also, in a way, working with a similar practice. But, because renaming acknowledges a person whose freedom was taken, it becomes another kind of act: it becomes more like a decolonial act. It’s a symbolic reclaiming of the freedom that was taken. That’s why renaming seems to be a powerful way of starting the conversation.

Renaming was a way of rewriting a history that was not known to most people. Those people who knew Agassiz didn’t know much about the racial theories he spread. He also, for instance, suggested segregation in the Southern states.  His very vocal racism was just too dominant not to be talked about as part of history-telling about him. This is also a discussion about who writes history: who writes it down? What is said? What is not said? It is important to understand that if something is not told, it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Renaming is also about how history can be renegotiated. I learned that history is not a fixed thing. It can be changed and altered now. Because in a way, like James Baldwin said, ‘History is not the past. It is the present.’

Usually, I choose the sites for intervention based on contacts and conversations; they are almost like the start of the research. And I go from one case to the next. This first intervention really opened up a dialogue with people from other parts of the world, not only in Switzerland.

Another place I went to was Brazil because Agassiz led the Thayer Expedition there from 1865 to 1866, 15 years after he commissioned the daguerreotypes of enslaved people. He was there for one year, researching fossils and looking for evidence of the Ice Age theory. As a result, a few places were named after him in Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, he also commissioned the Brazilian King’s official photographer Augusto Stahl to document African and Afro-Brazilian enslaved people without clothes. Then, when he travelled to Manaus in the Amazon area, he commissioned William James, one of his assistants, to photograph Indigenous people, mixed-race people, and people of Chinese descent, as ambrotypes, on glass. After I learned about this, I applied to a residency in Rio with my partner Petri Saarikko, who is also an artist. I contacted Professor Maria Helena Machado from the History Department of São Paulo University, who had worked with the race archive of Agassiz’s. She invited me to respond to this archive, and this was when I started the photography portrait series called The Mixed Traces (2010-ongoing).

After Brazil, I was interested in Aotearoa (New Zealand), where I also did one of the reparative interventions. I had the idea when I met Shannon Te Ao, an artist in the Sydney Biennial with me. Through research, I learned that a place there was also named after Agassiz. There are places named after him almost everywhere I go. For instance, we went to Canada in 2017 because of Agassiz. In Scotland, New York… There are many in the States.

I became involved in these questions after joining the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign. Before that, I did work that related to the colonial history of Haiti, where my mother is from. My father is from Switzerland. I learned that geography and naming are very colonial and that many places have been renamed after colonialists. For instance, when the Crown came to Aotearoa (New Zealand), Julius von Haast travelled there and ventured into the lands to find natural resources. During this journey, he named and renamed over 100 places after Europeans. So, it depends more on the circumstances of how places are named because Indigenous people name places, which have other histories. For instance, they didn’t want to rename the mountain in Switzerland because they said most places are not named after humans, so they didn’t want to rename it after another person. It was a bit of an excuse, perhaps.

In this context, it is very much about the decolonial act of changing places’ names to how they were originally. This now follows other initiatives, like Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa. More and more people have found that renaming can be a good way to highlight the issues about the struggle for liberation, how it’s possible to right the wrong, and how people who were oppressed before can now take agency, or we descendants can have our own agency. We live in a time when it is possible to do this, but it’s still very difficult. This history is not in the past, and it is still very present.

This is also one of the reasons why I’m interested in this project in relation to Agassiz. He was one of the people who literally taught racism. How does he still impact our time now? Where does it come from, this hate, this prejudice, and this white supremacy, which is still going strong?  The system is so influenced by the power of white supremacy in so many places in the world. I have a feeling that the more pressure we give doesn’t actually solve the problem. But I still think that initiatives like renaming do contribute to healing in a collective way through change. But there are always people against change.

People would say that they didn’t want to do it because if they changed one place’s name, they would have to change other places’ names. Everything was unnamed at some point, and somehow names were introduced and are suddenly considered final. It’s uncomfortable for people to accept change. In that sense, it’s a slow, slow process. I learned over the years that one needs to be persistent because, eventually, change will come.

That’s why we have tried to rename Agassizhorn on four attempts; the last was in 2020 because of the Black Lives Matter movement gaining interest around the world. We thought, after over ten years, maybe there was a change because the movement did lead to a lot of thinking, especially among the white population. But still, they decided not to rename the mountain, and they didn’t want to hear about it anymore.

In 2012, the founder Hans Fässler and another committee member Hans Barth planned an exhibition near the mountain, which was a kind of compromise by one of the local mayors who was the most open to learning more. He proposed the exhibition about Agassiz’s racism. The exhibition in Grindelwald, ‘Gletscherforscher, Rassist: Louis Agassiz (1807-2012)’ (Glaciologist, Racist: Louis Agassiz (1807-2012)), was about finding ways to communicate and share this untold history.

In 2013, I worked in a similar way as Agassiz: I also commissioned a photographer. In that case, it was Borut Peterlin who specialised in making wet-plate collodion photographs, ambrotypes. For me, it was important to work with him on this and not just to try to imitate how Agassiz’s ambrotypes look. It was important to have actor Thomas Götz play Louis Agassiz. Creating this series of photographs, Evidence, was a way of taking agency by putting Agassiz in front of the lens and playing with this impossible situation of putting myself next to him in the same image. It’s like an impossible reunion. It’s playing around with time. It’s like a visual interference in history, a visual history.

Later, I worked on Tailoring Freedom (2021-ongoing) in relation to Frederick Douglass, the most photographed person in the States at the time. He understood photography as an important way to leave a trace, position oneself, and write oneself into history.

The photographs of Renty, Delia, Jack, Drana, Jem, Alfred, and Fassena, the seven enslaved people Agassiz commissioned to be photographed in 1850, take centre stage in your ongoing series Tailoring Freedom. Renty’s image is also the face of the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign. Can you tell us more about how you first encountered these photographs? And why you felt it important to create Tailoring Freedom in response?

I got to know the series because of the renaming idea of ‘Rentyhorn’. But at the time, I only knew of the one photo of Renty, not the whole series. When I created the sign, I made a graphical representation of his portrait, and the body was cropped. I also made an ink drawing called Renty in Traditional African Clothing (2008). I dressed him in traditional Congolese dress because he and others were photographed without clothes, forcefully. So, it was a way of giving them back dignity. I’ve also tried to imagine how humiliating the situation must have felt, of needing to go to this studio, standing without clothes on in front of strangers, and then standing in front of this box on legs, not knowing what’s happening. They probably never saw those photographs and didn’t know what they were used for. Tailoring Freedom was a way of responding to that.

I revisited the idea of dressing everybody because we were contacted by Tamara Lanier, a descendant of Renty, and his daughter Delia, in 2012. Her daughters found the petition website that I started in 2008, http://www.rentyhorn.ch, where I told the story. She reached out and visited Switzerland for the opening of the exhibition in Grindelwald. She could tell who Renty was as a person, and she really gave him his humanity back. She could tell, for instance, that he could read, that he was teaching his children how to read, that he was a spiritual man, and so on. All this information was not documented at the time, and Agassiz didn’t care about who they were as human beings because they were not considered as such. It was extremely powerful to suddenly hear from Tamara because I thought that there must have been descendants, but it would have been impossible for me to find out who they were. Hans Fässler also invited Agassiz’s Swiss descendants who lived in the area, but they didn’t want to come. They were very much against this whole initiative because they were very proud of Agassiz.

In 2019, Tamara Lanier filed a lawsuit against Harvard University in order to get the photographs of her ancestors out of Harvard’s ownership because they are the only photographic images of her ancestors that the family has. The story was published in the New York Times and other magazines and newspapers, and that’s how the American descendant of Agassiz, his great great great granddaughter, learned about it and reached out to Tamara, wanting to support her. They wrote an open letter, signed by over 40 people from Agassiz’s family, which was addressed to the Harvard Board of Directors and was presented in June 2019. This was very powerful. In the press conference, the Laniers and Agassiz’s family came together to present this letter.

I wanted to make portraits of Renty and Delia and staple their clothes. Renty’s suit was inspired by a suit worn by Frederick Douglass. It’s a way of imagining the freedom they didn’t have during their lifetime. And Delia’s dress was inspired by a dress belonging to Harriet Tubman. The clothes also became armour that would protect them. For me, in the beginning, shooting staples was a way of reacting to history, defending, and shooting back. Later, it became more of a way of stitching the colonial wound together. I very much hope that Tailoring Freedom contributes to a healing process.

What was important for me was that this diptych was a gift to Tamara; that was before we knew that the lawsuit would be dismissed. It went further to the Supreme Court, and dismissed again and is still going further: although Harvard wouldn’t give back the photographs, she could sue them for emotional distress. Tamara’s reaction was also very powerful because she felt that I could take her ancestors out of their circumstances. For instance, she thought that Delia’s dress looked like a wedding dress and that Renty’s suit looked like his Sunday’s best. She was very moved by seeing her ancestors in the way they should have been respected.

I felt that it was important to do the same for the whole group because they all knew each other, and the others didn’t have the luck of having descendants fighting for their freedom on their behalf. This ‘freedom suit’ is a way of gaining freedom, so I felt it was very important to portray everybody in a similar way.

The daguerreotypes are from a very specific archive that I only started working with because of the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign. I haven’t worked with anything similar before. The series Tailoring Freedom was the first time I married stapling with photography.

In other series I’ve been working on, I create the whole image with staples. At times, I select images from existing photographs. In the case of the recent portrait I made, which is part of The Firsts, a series dedicated to people from the African diaspora that arrived in different European countries as some of the first people of colour in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is also about people from today who achieved certain goals as the first Black person. I portrayed Katherine Johnson, the mathematician at NASA who was instrumental in calculating the trajectories for the Apollo 11 moon landing. I contacted her family and got their permission to work with photographs of her.

I also made sure that I had the blessing of the James Baldwin Estate when I made the portrait of James Baldwin on one of the window shutters in the house he inhabited in a mountain village called Leukerbad in Switzerland. He lived there periodically between 1951 and 1953 to work on his first novel Go Tell it on the Mountain. At that time, there was no official memorial to him in the village, and I felt it would be important to make his time there visible by portraying him in a public space. The work has been there since 2018.

In the case of The Mixed Traces Series, it was important for me to use myself, being a person who shouldn’t exist in the eyes of Agassiz. I stand to reclaim the body and the place because I always stand in landscapes named after Agassiz. I also didn’t want to reuse the original photographs of people who couldn’t choose because I felt this would repeat the violence committed against them.

I want to call them self-portraits. They were made in different places called Agassiz in six different countries. Every time I worked with a different photographer.

This is, in a way, the starting point of my art practice, which has dealt with the situation of being more than one, being of many places. My mother’s heritage itself is also very diverse: it’s Indigenous, African, French, German… I spent very little time in Haiti and New York. My mother and her family immigrated to New York in the 60s because of the dictatorship in Haiti. But I’ve always felt very close to my mother’s family, even when I cannot spend more time with them physically.

My involvement in creating art was almost a compensation, a way to feel close to and learn about the history of Haiti. Also, it was because I wanted to go there. When I was a young adult, my mother always said I should not go because it was too dangerous. But somehow, I felt very compelled to go because we did have family who decided to stay there. It made me think and start to learn: why are there so many problems in Haiti? What caused this situation? Haiti was the first Black republic. In 1804, enslaved people had a successful revolution. But the oppression never stopped, even though they managed to become independent. It’s a very powerful and complex history, but it was also the beginning of me thinking about my heritage.

The topic of Agassiz has brought me back to Switzerland because I’ve been living in Finland since 2002. I started my art practice in Finland, a place where I had no history. So, it allowed me to start from a fresh place. I probably wouldn’t have taken this path if I had stayed in Switzerland. But I don’t know. You never know.

My background is in graphic design. My grandfather from Haiti, Georges Remponeau, was a self-taught painter. He also co-founded the art school Le Centre d’Art d’Haïti in 1944 with other Haitian artists. The Americans occupied Haiti for many years, and DeWitt Peters, an American amateur painter who worked as an English teacher there, found Haitian artists to have a very powerful way of expressing themselves visually and was very impressed by their talent. The school was a way of giving artists the possibility to paint and work. My grandfather was an inspiration for me from my early days.

In relation to the Demounting Louis Agassiz project, it is very important to collaborate with Indigenous people abroad. I collaborated with Māori people in Aotearoa (New Zealand) because I’m not from there, and I cannot just go there and create a similar gesture like in Switzerland. I call these interventions reparative interventions. It was the same in Canada, where I worked with Cynthia Pitsiulak (Kimmirut, NU) and Charlotte Qamaniq (Iglulik, NU), the throat singers who sang as part of the Mother Throat film, which took place at the Agassiz Lake in Quebec. They are from Nunavut but were living in Ottawa at the time.

Other than that, I often have ideas to do certain works that I don’t necessarily have the skill to do myself. So, I also collaborate with people who can help me realise my vision. And of course, Hans Fässler. He’s been my historical advisor from the beginning. We have a similar energy of not giving up and being persistent, so it’s been very natural to collaborate. I’ve also enjoyed going with Petri to many different residencies. Throughout the years, it’s always been wonderful to work with different people in different countries. And I’m very humbled to be in the position to do this. I understand working like this is a real privilege. People have welcomed me in working on those different histories and speaking about them in this artistic way or in the context of the arts.

What I like about creating art is that it allows you to see reality as you hope it could be. Everything seems somehow possible. Creating images of something that’s not there, not real, helps to make it real. Critical fabulation is something that’s important to my work. I did this even before I had the vocabulary for it or knew what critical fabulation meant. It is a kind of imagining and fills gaps that are missing in the archive.

It has been amazing to hear feedback from exhibition visitors, especially in London. I think it is really the place where people understand what I’m doing. I’ve been getting messages from strangers saying that they felt deeply moved by these different stories and that what I’m talking about is very special. It gives me the feeling that I’m on the right track.

But really, these personal reactions are from people who see this painful history in a nonviolent way. My work tells really heavy histories, but not in a way that inflicts trauma. I don’t want to traumatise people through my art. I also want to highlight its beauty. My idea of creating works is that I hope they can contribute to a collective healing process.

Art gets a life of its own when you create, and then you lose control. You don’t know what people will think. One can see what comes out of it. It is quite beautiful.

It makes sense that it comes there now, and I hope it’s not the last place. The exhibition definitely has to go to the States. But in Switzerland, it will be shown near where Rentyhorn is. It’s also special for me because when I left Switzerland, I wasn’t an artist yet. It’s going to be my first big exhibition in Switzerland. It’s like the circle is closing a bit. I’m also very happy that there is a book about the exhibition, You Name It, which is a good resource. Amazing writers have contributed to it, and I hope people can add it to their libraries and share it.

I’m currently planning a reparative intervention in Alaska at the Agassiz Glacier, which flows from Canada to Alaska, and the Agassiz Lake just next to it. I’m in contact with the Tlingit people. LaMont Hamilton, an artist friend of mine, is based in Anchorage. He introduced me to people, and now I’m just waiting for the permit from the National Park. That’s next in relation to the Agassiz project.

I’m also working on an exhibition project called ‘Stranger in the Village’ in Switzerland that includes new portraits in the ongoing series The Firsts and Shooting Stars for this exhibition. It will be a group exhibition, and the Rentyhorn video will be shown there as well.

The Shooting Stars (2014-ongoing) portraiture series is dedicated to people who were victims of assassination and killing because of political hate crimes. I’m portraying three people of African descent who were killed in Switzerland by the police during police interventions because of racial profiling. One case is very similar to the George Floyd case but has not been in the news that much. It’s very important to tell these stories, say their names and remember them.