STATE FICTION. Neutral Only on the Outside

Under the title "State Fiction" (2014–2021) the artist's long-term research focusses on the zone that divides the two Koreas, a locus of congealed international Cold War interests and a source of improbable images. After an internationally brokered armistice in 1953, the United Nations (UN) invited Switzerland to participate in the peacekeeping mission foreseen for the DMZ. Three other neutral nations were likewise present: Sweden represented the capitalist and anti-Communist Western bloc; Poland and Czechoslovakia, the Communist Eastern bloc. Armed Forces were then stationed extensively throughout the DMZ, and tasked to oversee the divided countries’ exchange of prisoners and arms. Following disbandment of the Eastern bloc, the mission was massively downsized, in part because North Korea spurned it in 1994, on the grounds that it no longer represented Communist interests. Switzerland nonetheless maintains a military presence there to this day. It was there that Swiss soldiers documented their daily lives and pastimes, their encounters with the local people, and their fascination with the Korean fauna and flora. This immense mass of images and films is now conserved in Bern, at the Library Am Guisanplatz (BiG) the main archive of the federal administration and the Swiss Armed Forces. Bertschi’s film montage for STATE FICTION consists entirely of such archive material. It reveals not only the gaze of these supposedly “neutral” soldiers— the way they regarded all that is “other”—but also, and above all, how, at the height of the Cold War, Swiss nationalism forged a narrative in which were fused both neutrality and a desire for power in the international arena. The video suggests, in effect, that Switzerland astutely seized upon this chance to improve its image, an image severely tarnished by the end of the Second World War; for while purporting to be neutral, the country had taken care to maintain its economic ties with Nazi Germany, to issue permits for the passage of German trains, and to impose extremely restrictive policy on Jewish refugees. To number among the four countries assigned a peacekeeping role in Korea was a welcome opportunity to renew relations with the leading international players, in particular with the USA, the living incarnation of the anti-Communist sentiment prevailing at the time among the Swiss.