land acknowledgment
sur le territoire suisse
landanerkennung

my name is claude wittmann.

this acknowledgement brings light on some of my own history and privileges together with a reverence to the lands i have had the chance to live on.

this acknowledgement follows the teachings of Jill Carter, Indigenous leader, researcher and theatre worker at the university of toronto, of Carmen Alvis, T'karonto-based Métis 2-spirit theatre artist and of Alec Whitewolf Butler, T'karonto-based 2-spirit playwright, filmmaker and performance artist of Mi'kmaw, French, Irish and Afro descent, originally from Cape Breton Island aka Uni'Maki aka "Island of Fog". they taught me that entering into any kind of relationship starts with acknowledging one's own history and the effort to educate oneself and deconstruct privileges.

i identify as a white settler, transgender and invisibly disabled artist whose artistic process started in T'karonto in 2003 after happily quitting academia. since 2017, this process has tried to break the barriers between the art container and real life with aiming at social change.

i have the privilege of double citizenship, in canada and in switzerland where i was born. my ancestors come from switzerland and germany. i do not know very much about the history of my family, but i can share that i am not tranquil about either part and neither am i tranquil to be a settler in T'karonto.

when in switzerland, i feel that my brain is wired in german and that acquiring a german citizenship would only be normal. but, official contacts with that hope have gone nowhere. i was born when my father was already swiss and had had to relinguish his german citizenship. that makes my access to german recognition impossible. on the other hand, i do not know if members of my family have been engaged actors in the nazi agenda, but i am pretty convinced this is the case and this is a silent trickster-killer inside of my psyche.

i acknowledge that i have had the privilege to study, obtain a PhD, occupy different jobs and travel in and from switzerland.

i acknowledge that when in switzerland, the fact that i am trans and disabled activates the daily discrimination that all minority groups experience and that this tends to veil from my consciousness the privileges i embody as a white swiss-born male-identifying individual.

still, i am heavily aware that switzerland tends to be seen as a beautiful, socially just, generally rich and well educated country with an exemplary democratic system and a just neutrality. this image is false.

i do not know if ever any community lived on the territory of current switzerland who conceived of land as sacred, shared and a true participant in life, like Indigenous communities do in canada and other countries in america or australia or elsewhere.

historical texts about switzerland speak of migration, empires, monarchies, battles, epidemics, celtic and alaman tribes, religious rituals, legendary moments, etc. they also speak of the feudal order, a punishing system in which lords owned the land and often also the people who worked on the land for them while also rendering other services.

still now, farmers can be left struggling: farmers who run small farms earn less than minimal wage and we are losing between 600 and 800 farms per year.

switzerland is maybe more particularly tainted by dark chapters in its relationships with difference.

i can't do justice to how badly people who differ from the norms have been and are still treated in switzerland, but i care to list here, in a telegraphic style, a few of the elements that weigh on my heart.

switzerland is in europe the area where the highest numbers of witches were judged and burnt; there is overwhelming evidence that switzerland collaborated widely with the nazi regime during WWII; switzerland also urged germany to mark Jewish passports with a 'J' to make it easier to prevent them from entering the country; swiss banks took in more than $4 billion of assets looted by nazi SS during the Holocaust; they also took in the royalties from hitlers' book; art looted by nazis is still collected and exposed at one museum at least in zürich; between the 1920s up to the 1980s, more than 100,000 thousand children were forcibly taken away from itinerant families, mostly Jenish and Manouches/Sintés and from poor families with the goal of assimilation. the children were placed mostly in foyers and institutions, sometimes in families. they had to work and they were submitted to aggravated violence. this is now recognized as a crime against humanity; switzerland has not militarily colonized any countries, but it is a colonial state: it has contributed in very obvious ways to the colonisation agenda: the swiss economic "empire" has grown and is still growing on the shoulders of poorly treated legal and illegal foreign workers here or thanks to local workers where swiss big companies build their badly paying, repressive and resources-exploiting multinational network; switzerland ranks second among companies exporting coffee - yes coffee; a lot of legal foreigners are suddenly expulsed from switzerland on the basis that they receive social assistance; a lot of missionaries and mercenaries have settled in other countries to impose "civilizing" goals, erasure, assimilation and genocide; switzerland is a shadow of the power of the multinational banks it is not shy to "save" when in trouble; it is a major player in economic globalisation, the financialization of our lives and the current right-wing backlash; etc.) all this and more, in a context in which systemic analysis seems to be at its infancy. this is particularly the case regarding poverty, appropriation, migration, racism, ethno-cultural difference, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia, pathologisation, ableism/"capacitisme", ageism, etc.


i acknowledge that as a swiss citizen, i have advocated for the rights of transgender and non-binary and for disabled individuals, but not had the health and energy to address any other dark chapters.

j'ai trop de douleurs dans mes mains et mes bras pour traduire en ce moment.

ich habe im moment zu starke schmerzen in den händen und armen, um übersetzen zu können.