For more than three hundred years, Swiss commodity trading has been part of a mesh of colonial, postcolonial and neoliberal entanglements. It enabled both early modern industrialization and the constitution of the Switzerland as a financial center. It also brought about specific aesthetic, affective and moral economies. The Swiss myth of neutrality turns dirty materialities and trades in commodities into an opaque and discrete form of technocracy, security, philanthropy and white supremacy.

The Swiss Psychotropic Gold Refining fabulates on commodity trading and refining of gold. Narratives of violence, the access on black bodies, derivative enrichments, psychotropic energies and mutual indebtness molecularise on the high-gloss, tenderly protective metal. Calvinist gold is never shown. It goes through repeated cycles of purification/refinement, processing and remelting – making it suitable for any form of erasing traces and anonymising, as well as the healing of post-/colonial amnesia.

Part of DRAFT Beijing, Cairo, Cape Town, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Mumbai, St. Petersburg and Zurich June 2015–July 2016
Collaborators: CAMP, Khanabadosh/Gitanjali Dang, Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty (Bombay); Beirut/Sarah Rifky and Jens Maier-Rothe, Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk, Alia Mossallam (Cairo); Chimurenga, Riason Naidoo, Jay Pather, Richard Pithouse (Cape Town); Sophie Goltz, Alice Peragine, Christoph Schäfer (Hamburg); Giorgio Biancorosso, Para Site/Cosmin Costinas and Qinyi Lim, Samson Young (Hong Kong); Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Teatro Ojo (Mexico City); Ju Anqi, Li Zhenhua, Iris Long (Shanghai); Chto Delat (St. Petersburg); IFCAR/Christoph Schenker, Nina Bandi, Rohit Jain, knowbotiq (Zurich)