Forestscapes and the plantation. The ‚longue-durée‘ of Swiss coloniality shaping Brazilian and Swiss land

How can artistic practices trace, unearth and reveal long lasting intrusion into landscapes and ecosystems through colonial infrastructure? This talk compares the romantizised visual language in travelogues of european „scientific“ explorers in the forestscapes of South Bahia, where Swiss settlers set up profitable slavery-based coffee plantations in the 19th century, with oral histories from enslaved Africans’ descendants still living on the very same land today. Memory and landscapes are heavily interlinked through seemingly inconspicuous markers on these lands, while the capital flow of colonial profit significantly shaped the Swiss landscape concurrently.