“Renaming a place makes it possible to designate forgotten parts of history. To rewrite history. But the objective is not to change all the names”, recognizes the artist Sasha Huber, who began her career by attacking, literally, a peak in the Swiss Alps: the Agassizhorn. It was 2008 and she was planting, once at the top, a plaque giving the peak a new name, Rentyhorn.
Born in 1975, in Zürich, to a Haitian mother and a Swiss father, but a Finnish artist for twenty years, Sasha Huber is presenting an impressive exhibition this spring in Toronto, her first in North America. On display at the Power Plant Center, steps from the CN Tower, You Name It traces all the energy she deployed in her fight against the commemoration of Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), a botanist and geologist considered racist.
The movement to which the Finno-Swiss-Haitian artist adhered is called Disassemble Agassiz. It is the initiative of the historian Hans Fässler, author ofA slave-holding Switzerland — travel to a country beyond suspicion (2005). A website quotes the odious figure: “Establish Negro communities in the tropics if you are able to interest yourself in the future of the Negroes, but do not be seduced by false philanthropy into associating the future of the white race to that of the blacks. »
“He was an influential racist, recalls Sasha Huber, joined in Helsinki. But when he began to associate religion with science, he discredited himself. After the publication of The origin of species of Darwin, it became clear that his theories were wrong. »
Videos, photographs, actions, sculptures, drawings, texts… Huber’s art not only covers a broad spectrum of creation, but it takes you on a journey. The Power Plant exhibition entitles you to the spectacular Alps (the video Rentyhorn), as well as remote corners in New Zealand, Brazil, the United States, Quebec, and a face-to-face encounter with the Moon.
Places called Agassiz are not found only in Switzerland, the character’s homeland. The team of Disassemble Agassiz has identified 80. Thirty are located in the United States, where the man lived from 1846 until his death. “His racist actions” take shape at this time, a period however intense against slavery and racism.
A lake in Quebec
With its twenty lakes, mountains, forests and up to one Agassiz street (in Winnipeg), Canada ranks second on this list, far ahead of Switzerland. Sasha Huber explains this because the scientist has made glaciers his specialty.
Quebec’s Lake Agassiz? A magnificent expanse of water in Abitibi that the artist filmed from the air. Produced during a residency in 2017 at the Axe-Néo 7 center in Gatineau, the video Mother Throat features two throat singers from Nunavut, Charlotte Qamaniq and Cynthia Pitsiulak. The artist wanted to work with them, at home, but for reasons of distance and security, she was content to travel 300 km from Gatineau.
“I repeat the experience I had in New Zealand and symbolically erase the links between a place and Agassiz,” she comments. It is a poetic ritual that frees the landscape from the imposed name. It debaptizes more than it renames. »
Start a discussion
The objective of Disassemble Agassiz, and her own plans, she says, is “to start a discussion about everything Agassiz has done.” Sasha Huber has found a thousand ways to knock him off his pedestal. In Agassiz Down Under Postershe appropriates photos of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 where we see the statue of the scientist overthrown, his head in floor. In the pictures of the series The Mixed Tracesshe appears naked, taking postures that evoke the portraits that Agassiz made of slaves.
“My body serves as my position. Agassiz was against mixing. In his eyes, I would not exist, ”she claims.
It is one of the slaves photographed in the XIXand century, Renty, whom Sasha Huber wanted to honor in 2008 when she climbed, by helicopter, in the Alpine heights. Agassizhorn however remains the official name, Rentyhorn not having been approved by all the municipalities concerned. There is still resistance to accepting another part of the story.