0.4 STRIKE [AT] THE BORDER!

Date
2025

Curation
Bassma El-Adissey

Format
Multimedia Installatio

Exhibition
Kunstraum Aarau
11.4.–11.5.2025

Vernissage
11.04.2025 in conversation with Charles Heller (Border Forensics), Lucia Bernini & Rohit Jain

Credits
Aargauer Kuratorium
the City of Aarau
F+F School for Art and Design
Aargauer Kunsthaus

Strike [at] the Border! explores the entanglement of borders, material extraction, and labor exploitation within the Swiss gold trade through two spatial investigations. Using visual strategies and forensic methods, Rami Msallam’s (*1999) work aims to disrupt the postcolonial amnesia in Switzerland and beyond. By closely reading the discursive boundaries of a trial before the Supreme Court of Canada, deconstructing the contested rights arising from a labor strike at a gold refinery on the Swiss-Italian border, and geographically locating voids in earth left by Italian colonial mines in Eritrea, the exhibition shifts its focus from the mere depiction of events of violence to an examination of the structures, relationships, and conditions that make them possible. Strike [at] the Border! points to the urgency of reparative justice and enables a situated interrogation of the topic.

The Gold Refinery as Border Technology (2025) on the ground floor uses the 1993 strike by workers at the Valcambi Gold Refinery in Balerna as an opportunity to highlight the connections between border regimes and labor exploitation. The two-part multimedia installation addresses the border region of Ticino as a place where structural violence against (mostly racialized) guest, seasonal, and border workers, as well as the Swiss gold trade, systematically intersect due to geographic, historical, and political circumstances. A shelf with red binders, featuring a deliberately placed gap, draws a connection to Switzerland’s circumvention of sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa. Further back in the room, an excerpt from the artist’s ongoing research links the issue of border violence as an instrument of power that is not only applied in Ticino but also throughout Swiss economic and social policies.

Upstairs, a three-channel video installation expands on these themes: Who takes responsibility when miners from Bisha in Eritrea sue a Canadian company for laundering gold obtained under inhumane conditions in Swiss refineries? Who benefits from the exploitation of nature and people, as well as the perpetuation of colonial structures in former Italian East Africa? Voids in Earth (2024) provides no answers – instead, the work weaves a dense web of historical and documentary connections. In doing so, it makes visible a network of mechanisms of oppression, with Swiss neutrality once again playing a significant role at its center.

to be updated, May 2025

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