In August 2008, Sasha Huber landed by helicopter near the peak of the Agassizhorn mountain in Switzerland. She was carrying a metal plaque which she hammered into the ice, symbolically renaming the mountain Rentyhorn in honour of a Congolese-born slave, Renty Taylor, who had spent most of his life in captivity on a plantation in the US state of South Carolina. “As an artist,” says Huber, “I wanted to investigate Switzerland’s involvement in the slave trade, because nobody taught us that history.”
The previous year, Huber had joined a committee of activists, historians and artists involved in a campaign called Demounting Louis Agassiz. Their aim was to remove the name of the eminent 19th-century Swiss geologist and glaciologist not just from the mountain, but from the many sites around the globe that honour him. As such, their actions prefigured the widespread interrogation of historical monuments, sites and statues that accompanied the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. In 2015, Huber found out that a statue of Agassiz at Stanford University had been upended during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She subsequently created three protest posters based on photographs of the toppled statue, to address police brutality against black people and call for the removal of statues that honour figures linked to racism.
