The Right To Forget, video, 25', 2025

Exhibition text in Revolt Against the Sun!, Kunsthaus Baselland

«They burnt everything. We don’t talk about it anymore. There are no documents left, no pictures, no archives. Forget about it». These were the first words my father spoke to me when I asked him about the gold mining project of my grandfather, Hans Mazenauer. The latter was connected with Mobutu Sese Seko and the mining business in the 1980s. The Schaffhauser bank, with whom he collaborated, destroyed all the evidence and therefore the archives. They justified themselves by saying «we have the right to forget». What these two acts of destruction have in common is the erasure of the past, the desire to forget about a certain period.

The Right To Forget is a short essay film that seeks to reveal the present-day traces of a family taboo: the dream of wealth, the failure and loss of my grandfather, grounded in Swiss gold trade taboo and bank secrecy. Through human and non-human voices (such as that of the okapis brought by Mobutu Sese Seko to Basel Zoo in the 1980s), we move forward in an investigation into gaps.