Articulated Absences and Silenced Souvenirs: exploring Switzerland’s complicity in the trading of Nazi gold through a counter-archive

Switzerland functioned as a ‘gold hub’ during the Second World War, accepting vast amounts of gold from the Reichsbank in exchange for hard currency and thus playing an indispensable role for the Nazis. However, this financial complicity was concealed after the war. Instead, the Swiss government constructed an official narrative celebrating the sacrificial efforts of the Swiss Army as the reason the Nazis did not invade Switzerland. Alongside in-depth historical research contradicting this grand narrative, this patriotic wartime memory has persisted.

My practice-led research responds to this historical invisibility through a counterarchive of objects and material interventions, in order to facilitate an alternative engagement with Switzerland’s contested past and encourage critical discourse about the impacts of state secrecy on cultural memory and national identity. With a focus on the drawing of conceptual and symbolic connections, this argument is discussed by analysing my practical experiments with gold interventions on souvenirs and military memorabilia, objects that have reinforced Switzerland’s romanticised perceptions and solidified the ideological manipulation of its historical narrative. Gold can be melted and remelted countless times to disguise its origin fully and thus represents a secret. Drawing on Clare Birchall’s notion of an ‘aesthetics of the secret’, the concept of articulated absences is introduced to consider these objects as symbols for the memory gaps perpetuating Switzerland’s innocent wartime image.

The counter-archive provides a framework for the ordering of these articulated absences while questioning the institutional authority assigned to archives as collections of historical evidence. Using an archival method in artistic practice highlights the vulnerability of archives to being used as instruments to uphold master narratives, marginalise histories and obliterate unfavourable facts. The counter-archive thus emphasises archival exclusions to invite questions about the impact of political objectives on our remembrance of Switzerland’s past. It reflects on the reciprocal relationship between archives and political, social, and cultural factors to highlight their interconnection and understand their influence on collective memory.