Denise Bertschi artist's text

Scopic Practices of the Swiss Neutral Military Men
Wandering through the masses of photographs produced by the Swiss men traveling to Korea under the guise of their neutral military mission after the Korean armistice, is a valuable tangent by which to approach the multi layered and geopolitically charged space in the wake of the so-called Cold War. It is valuable because it allows us to understand the complexity of the gaze, with which these military men scanned their environment and visually sensed their experience in an Extra-European, post-colonial context, previously unknown to them. How did their photographic decision-making influence the complex fabric of relations around the act of photography, in the historical and geographical space of a newly divided Korea? Which are the visual strategies the amateur photographers and film makers applied in their peripheral vision, while scanning the objects and life around them? Moreover, what was the influence of their military role, labelled with Swiss neutrality? I argue that these—exclusively—men, developed a quasi-ethnographic gaze, fundamentally rooted in masculinity, on the cultural ways of life of Korean peoples and, thereby, stepped into a tradition of visual strategies they knew from travelogues of ethnographers, or the so-called explorers of non-western cultures from the end of the 19th century to the second
half of the 20th century. They applied strategies of visually collecting or capturing what was foreign to them and through the photographic act owning what they saw. By doing so, they fixed cultural differences towards their exoticized photographic subjects. What remained in the pars optica retinae, the “seeing” part of the eye and what stayed, symbolically speaking, in their pars caeca retinae, the “blind” part of the retina?

The official military mission’s objective was to “supervise, observe, inspect, and investigate” (1) the armistice agreement of 1953 that the representatives of the US, China and North Korea decided on. As defined in an internal report of the Swiss military, neither of the two conflicting war parties were allowed to reinforce their own army’s infrastructures: “The inspection of combat aircraft, armoured vehicles, weapons and ammunition by the NNIT shall be conducted in such a manner that the members of these groups can be fully satisfied that these combat aircrafts, armoured vehicles, weapons and ammunition are not being imported into Korea as reinforcements.” (2)

Nevertheless, browsing through the photographic archive of the neutral Swiss men in Korea, we realize that they did not only “monitor, observe, inspect, and investigate” possible military enforcements, but also the
everyday activities, fauna and flora, landscapes, women, children, and men, living in rural and urban environments in either North or South Korea. In the beginning of their task, from 1953 on, they were stationed at the
Joint Security Area in the demilitarized zone (DMZ), but some mobile teams were sent in rotation to other places in the North as well as in the South of the peninsula. The visual lens travelled with them: to Incheon,
Daegu, Busan, Gangneung and Kunsan, regions under military control of the United Nations-Command—and to Sinu˘iju, Ch’o˘ngjin, Hu˘ngnam, Manp’o and Sinanju, regions under military control of the Korean
People’s Army and the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army. The neutral status of the Swiss enabled them to enter both territories, forcefully divided in 1945. What do these photographs witness at the frontier of the perceivable of these highly politized places, which remained restricted to the divided parties? What are the ghosts of what Heonik Kwon calls a “hot”, instead of a “cold” war,3 which might appear through them and what is the role of the seemingly neutral spectators in military uniforms?

In this essay, I will look at how the visual strategies of the Swiss amateur photographers in their function as neutral military in Korea rendered visible the making of the national myth of neutrality—still a stronghold of the Swiss national identity. In this Extra-European territory, they negotiated neutrality between the capitalist West, and the communist East, while constantly upholding the image of the small state named Switzerland as that of a “peace island”. To uphold this purity of the superior vision of Swiss neutrality, the “imagined-nation” needed to constantly construct and maintain the image of “the other”. While developing a quasi-ethnographic gaze in post-colonial Korea, the Swiss “self” reflected in their own photographs. This essay closely analyses the construction of the colonial gaze through the legacy of the photographs and film footage of the Swiss Neutral Mission in Korea.

Furthermore, the spatial formations of the photographic landscape where the images stem from are put into focus, while looking at de- and reterritorializing processes in the DMZ for building a peace infrastructure. Analysing closely their representation of the land and landscape, it reveals how it played a role in constructing the process of colonial “othering”, not only of the people, but of the land, mountains, fauna, and flora. Their narratives, told through images as well as their diaries, are both overtly and covertly witnessing the violence and traumas of a war-torn territory and its lingering ghostly presences in a multi-layered network of global hegemonial conflicts. The Swiss military presence in East Asia—on a parquet of global politics—was a novelty, and the picture-taking officers reinforce their presence through the photographic act. Nevertheless, the Swiss were kept in an infrastructural, moral, and cultural dependency on the US army. While upholding a Western hegemony, this may have weakened the well-maintained fiction of Swiss neutrality.

1 «Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission: Funktionen und Vollmachten» in: «Auszug aus dem Waffenstillstandsvertrag, Fassung Mitte Juli 1953», Korea-Archiv, Bibliothek Am Guisanplatz (BiG), Bern
2 «Auszug aus dem Waffenstillstandsvertrag, Fassung Mitte Juli 1953», Korea-Archiv, BiG, Bern
3 Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War, Columbia University Press, 2010, p.3