Team

Noémie Etienne is SNSF Professor at the University of Bern and a specialist in early modern art and culture. Before coming back to Switzerland, she worked in the United States for four years: first as a SNSF post-doctoral fellow and visiting scholar at New York University (2012), then as a teacher and researcher at the Institute of Fine Arts (Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, 2013–2015) and finally at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (Postdoctoral Fellow, 2015–2016). She was a scientific assistant (teaching and research) at the University of Geneva (2005-2011) and the University of Zurich (2013).

The term “exotic” appears twice in the Encylopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert (1765). First, it is used to describe non-French flora (“flore exotique”). Second, the term “exotic” designates a specific Japanese varnish (“un vernis exotique”). The text also provided a recipe to make this “exotic” varnish in France, similar to the “Vernis Martin,” which copied Japanese lacquer. In this project, I aim to understand how non-Western technologies and their imitation, particularly lacquer and varnish, were used in the construction of exoticism, but also of European identities. Between 1600 and 1800, artists, craftsmen, and factories experimented intensively in order to imitate foreign techniques. The material appropriation of cultural products was key in transforming visual and material worlds in Europe. Furthermore, the notion of imitation was a key concept in contemporary artistic literature. This encompassed not only stylistic imitation of what was perceived as being Chinese or Turkish, but also technical and material emulation. While art history has given extensive consideration to style, the appropriation of non-Western technologies in eighteenth-century French design demands a reconsideration of technological and artisanal imitation that goes beyond the domain of style.

Claire Brizon obtained her PhD in Art History at the University of Bern (2021). Previously she got a master degree in Museology at the University of Lyon (2005) and worked for the Musée des Confluences (Lyon), where she was involved in the conception of exhibitions, particularly those that dealt with pacific collections.

In her PhD entitled, Collections coloniales dans un pays sans colonies ? Collectes et usages d’artificialia et de naturalia non-européens aux XVIIème et XVIIIème siècles en Suisse, she studied swiss museums’ collections, all disciplines combined, including non-European artifacts and specimens, from America, Asia and Pacific brought during the 17th and 18th centuries. Their study raises questions of provenance, particularly in the geopolitical context of a country that neither pursued an expansionist policy nor built an empire. This geopolitical particularity has often led to the exclusion of these collections from studies of imperial, royal or princely origin in France, England and elsewhere. It seems essential, however, to ask the following questions about them: Who collected them? In what context? What were their uses once they arrived on the territory of the former Confederation? And finally, where were they presented?

This critical work brings new elements to the history of non-european collections on the swiss context, and not only on a cabinet or a city. It also places this history in the context of current European questions about the future of non-European collections, in particular the importance of making inventories and other sources available to the Indigenous Communities, an element that would accelerate the restitution process of these collections acquired in a colonial context.

Now she is working as museologist for several museal and archival institutions in Switzerland.

Chonja Lee is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern and specialized in modern art and culture. She obtained her PhD 2015 at the University of Zurich with an interdisciplinary thesis on images of the plant soul in French fine arts, dance and film around 1900. She is a former fellow at the Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIK-ISEA) and SNSF-fellow at German Forum for Art History (DFK) in Paris and Princeton University. She worked as scientific assistant and has taught at the Universities of Geneva, Zurich and Bern. She holds a MA in European and Asian Art History and Political Science. Besides her research, she worked in corporate communication for NZZ-Media Group and as an art mediator at the Museum Rietberg.

Her research project entitled Political Patterns. European printed Cotton Textiles for West Africa in the 18th and early 19th Century and a New History of Style investigates designs of European chintzes destined for the West African market from an art historical, media theoretical and anthropological perspective. The study takes a close look at patterns of fabrics–one of the main exchange good in the transatlantic slave trade–and unfolds their status between fabric and image, figuration and abstraction, and different constructions of symbolic meaning. European drawers and engravers would recycle prints, translate European scenes into pseudo-African contexts, freely imagine African people, flora and fauna, as well as develop adaptations of African iconographies with specific ornaments, colors and symbols embedded in local visual cultures. The global textile trade, driven by economic market specialization, spurred a superficial European interest in African visual culture and fashion. While Chinoiserie and Turquerie were much fancied foreign inspired styles within the European decorative arts, an African style was only mimicked for the African consumers themselves and one century prior the fine arts orientation on African art principles.

Etienne Wismer studied Art History and Philosophy at the Universities of Geneva and Bern. He holds a Master’s degree in Art History with special qualifications in Curatorial Studies and Museology. Between 2013 and 2017, he worked as a research assistant to the project “Artists and Books (1880-2015): Switzerland as a Cultural Plateform” at the University of Lausanne and the Swiss National Library. In 2016, he co-organized the symposium “Die Biografien der Kunstwerke. Perspektiven der Provenienzgeschichte in der Forschun an Universität und Museum”, which took place at the University of Bern and Kunstmuseum Bern. He also works as an art mediator and freelance curator.

In his PhD project, entiteld The World on the Wall, he will examine how images and artifacts made in Switzerland, so-called Helvetica, were collected in a global context during the 18^thand 19^th century. His research is about the material culture of collecting. He aims to investigate the diversity of such objects – oil paintings, prints, textiles, or stones – and their provenance history. Who is collecting Helvetica? What do collectors want? What is the link between materials, object categories, and attributions? The imaginative and memorial power of things and the invention of Switzerland’s national identity are at the center of this research.

Sara Petrella completed her PhD at the University of Geneva, entitled Dieux et métamorphose. Regards croisés sur la Mythologie de N. Conti et V. Cartari (2017). She recently published a book, co-authored with Professor Philippe Borgeaud, on the origins of the history of religions during the 18th century (Le singe de l’autre, Geneva, 2017). The book focuses on the representation of American “savages” in two illustrated books, namely, Lafitau’s Mœurs des sauvages ameriquains (Paris, 1724), and Bernard and Picart’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses des peuples idolâtres (Amsterdam, 1723).

Her research project at the University of Bern will analyze how foreign material culture relocated to French and Swiss collections interacted with objects illustrated and commented on in printed books. The assumption is that mutual influences and tensions can be seen between exotic objects reproduced in books, objects exposed in private collections, and objects that were integrated in the arts. The project will examine agents involved in the creation of books, in particular authors and engravers who were also collectors, such as Samuel Braun, the Monconys brothers, and Elie Bertrand. By adopting this case study approach, the project seeks to examine how foreign material culture fed into and shaped the representation of the “savage” in the 17th century, before the decline of this idea during the 18th century, which not coincidentally witnessed the invention of the word “ethnography” by Alexandre-César Chavannes.