Vera Zurbrügg is a visual artist from Switzerland currently undertaking doctoral research at the London College of Communication (LCC), UAL. Her practice-based research investigates Switzerland’s complicity in the gold trades with the Nazis and explores the impact of state secrecy on collective memory and national identity. Vera is a member of RAKE - a visual research collective using open-source data to investigate a variety of unseen and obscured elements in society, business, and politics.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
In December 2019, I graduated with Distinction from the MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at LCC and started my PhD at the same institution in 2020. In my research I am drawing on an aesthetics of the secret – using conceptual readings and material interventions – to emphasise archival gaps and historical absences. Through the creation of a counter-archive - made up collected mnemonic items and gilded objects – I am further questioning the inherent power dynamics and ideological underpinnings of institutional knowledge structures.
