Denise Bertschi
Early-Career Fellow 2024–2025

Denise Bertschi (born 1983 in Aarau, Switzerland) is an artist and researcher at the intersection of visual culture, history, and architecture. She critically investigates archives, landscapes, and the built environment on their colonial traces related to Switzerland’s extra-european expansion. Her research unfolds in installations, publications, or films and raises questions around cultural myths such as Swiss neutrality or coloniality, and their longue durée into present environmental crises.

Denise holds a PhD from the Arts of Sciences Laboratory at the Department of Architecture at EPFL Lausanne. She was awarded the Manor Art Prize in 2020 and the Most Beautiful Swiss Books in 2019 and 2022. Her work has been widely exhibited, including at the Centre Culturel Suisse Paris (FR), Swiss National Museum Zurich (CH), Fotomuseum Winterthur (CH), Swiss Art Awards (CH), Artsonje Center Seoul (KR), Artivist Johannesburg (ZA), and LACA Los Angeles (US). She has published the monographs State Fiction. The Gaze of the Swiss Neutral Mission in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (CPG, 2021) and Strata. Mining Silence (edition fink, 2020) and has co-edited the volume Unearthing Traces. Dismantiling the imperialist entanglements of archives, landscapes and the built environment (EPFL Press, 2023).