ké*sarà

It was narrow. Very narrow. On 7 June 1970, Swiss men voted on the so-called «Foreign Infiltration Initiative» submitted by James Schwarzenbach of the National Action Party against Foreign Infiltration of the Nation and Homeland. The 75% turn-out was unusually high. The initiative was rejected with 54% voting «No». This also meant that almost half of the voters were in favour of reducing the number of people without a Swiss passport in Switzerland to 10% and expelling around 300,000 foreigners from the country. Though the initiative was defeated, the topic remained alive. The initiative marked the beginning of a right-wing populist, xenophobic and ostracising policy, which is still present in Swiss politics, as can be seen in initiatives by the Swiss People’s Party SVP.

The collective ké*sarà, founded by social anthropologist Rohit Jain, theatremaker Tim Zulauf and historian Paola De Martin, takes the 50th anniversary of the Schwarzenbach initiative as an occasion for an artistic and ethnographic long-term project, with which they bring to mind  the long tradition of xenophobia and structural racism in Switzerland. Corresponding examples are found easily: the inhuman statutes regarding seasonal workers, which prohibited the immigration of family members; the exploitative working conditions in construction; the shanty towns for immigrant workers; the undisguised rejection of Italians, easily forgotten in times of trendy «Italianità» today.

The project of ké*sarà for an «anti-racist remembrance policy in Switzerland» does not rely on pleas but makes the imminent racist structures of recent Swiss history evident during site visits and encounters. Personal memories and accounts of people with migration experience from the 60s and 70s bring the past into the present day, and, complemented with the experiences of contemporary migrant communities, become part of a new migrant historiography. For the first part of the project, running until 2021, the team has chosen venues which played an important role in the lives of immigrant workers at the time: Ristorante Cooperativo and Punto d’Incontro, meeting places of the politically organised counterculture, and the Libreria Italiana. The first part of this projects concludes in the Volkshaus with a large gathering of contemporary witnesses and guests. (esc)