Katja Brunner

A chicken plucker, a chicken, a feather and the shaft of the feather walk across the village square carrying heavy things, from a stretcher to a coffin.

This image is a recurring motif in Katja Brunner's text. The associative body of the text deals with a topic that has been hushed up and ignored for years in neutral Switzerland: the Holocaust. Around 1,000 people from Switzerland were killed in the Second World War. They were deported from this beautifully furnished, Biedermeier-style, sterile, dusty still life that keeps silent about it.


With impressive images and precise poetry, Katja Brunner ventures into what previously remained under lock and key. The existing files are gathering dust in archives. There is no common memory, no commemoration of the victims. Katja Brunner creates her own way of approaching the subject. This indirect confrontation goes deeper, is more demanding, more accusatory and more painful than the pure facts reveal, and that is why it is so touching.