lisa mazenauer

Series of 6 photographs
Double-sided inkjet prints
2025

Six Gold Mines For A Swiss is based on a newspaper article of the same title, published in the Swiss newspaper 24 Heures in 1982. It recounts the plan of Hans Mazenauer, my grandfather, to exploit six gold mines in close connection with Mobutu Sese Seko in the former Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC). As with the opacity surrounding the gold trade in Switzerland, very few archives of this story remain.

Based on six open-pit mines currently visible on Google Earth satellite images, the six photographs of plaster casts embody sections of land now missing in the DRC. The images of negative space created by extraction reflect on that past story, linking it to its ongoing consequences and lingering traces. On a broader level, Six Gold Mines For A Swiss questions the central role Switzerland plays in the global gold trade. The back of each image indicates the geographical coordinates of the corresponding mines.

This work is related to The Right to Forget and Swiss Gold Entropy