Visual artist Sasha Huber honors her ancestors’ commitment to freedom through an art practice that has taken her around the globe. Huber, whose mother is Haitian and father is Swiss, was born and raised in Switzerland but grew up visiting relatives in New York who’d fled the dictatorship of François Duvalier, or Papa Doc. Curiosity about Haiti led her to study the first modern Black republic’s history as the only successful slave revolt in human history (1791-1804) and the first nation to permanently abolish slavery (1793). From this, her art began to engage the politics of memory and movement in the African and Caribbean diasporas, in particular traces of colonial residue left in the environment.

Huber now lives and creates in Helsinki, Finland, but her work, in particular a 15-year Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign, drew her to seven countries, from the Swiss Alps to Brazil to Oceania, to address the problematic legacy of her countryman, the naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873). Swiss-born Agassiz, who advocated racial segregation and white supremacy, is back in the news, thanks to Tamara Lanier’s groundbreaking lawsuit against Harvard University to repatriate daguerréotypes of her ancestors – some of the oldest existing photographs of enslaved people – he commissioned as director of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology. In 1850 Agassiz embraced photography as a new technology for his eugenics campaign and traveled to a South Carolina slave labor camp, where he chose seven enslaved individuals – Alfred, Fassena and Jem, Jack and his daughter Drana, Renty and his daughter Delia – to prove his theories of Black inferiority. The seven were then stripped, restrained, and forced to pose in the studio of photographer Joseph T. Zealy (1812–1893). Lesser known than the so-called Zealy or Slave Daguerréotypes are the more than 100 photographs Agassiz commissioned during an 1865 trip to Brazil to disprove evolution.

Despite his belief in pseudoscience, Agassiz’s contributions to paleontology, geology, ichthyology, and glaciology have resulted in seven animals and over 80 landmarks on Earth, the Moon, and Mars being named after him. Huber was first made aware of this during 200th anniversary celebrations of his birth in 2007 and devised an artistic intercession atop a 12,946-foot-high mountain in the Swiss Alps. Upon learning that she was part of the Demounting Louis Agassiz Committee, founded by Swiss activist historian Hans Fässler to demand that Agassiz peak be renamed, the helicopter company she’d hired canceled. At the last minute, she found a pilot willing to fly her to the summit, where she installed a plaque about Renty Taylor, Lanier’s ancestor from the contested daguerréotypes (Rentyhorn, 2008). Lanier heard about the campaign and traveled to Switzerland with her daughters. Since then, Huber has been staging what she calls “Reparative Interventions,” ranging from photographing herself naked in sites bearing Agassiz’s name (Agassiz: The Mixed Traces Series, 2010-ongoing) to unnaming-ceremonies conducted with indigenous inhabitants in such places as Algonquin First Nation, Scotland, Toronto and Aotearoa (New Zealand).

In 2019, Lanier reached out again, and Huber’s partner, Petri Saarikko, filmed Pictures af a Reparation, a press conference held by Agassiz’s American descendants, 43 of whom signed an open letter to Harvard supporting Lanier’s claim and requesting that her ancestors’ daguerréotypes be returned. Huber and Saarikko then collaborated with African American historian and genealogist Debbie-Ann Paige on Remedy for Freedom – The Underground Railroad on Staten Island (2019). This red-and-white timeline painted on a huge (230 inch by 62 inch) cotton canvas charts the history of the Underground Railroad in Staten Island, a longtime gateway to freedom due to its strategic location in New York Harbor and the existence of two free communities of color, plus an active abolitionist movement. Remedy for Freedom starts with the 1664 institution of slavery on Staten Island and ends with Eric Garner’s murder in 2014 and threatened raids on immigrant communities in 2019.

Recently The Power Plant (Toronto) and Autograph APB (London) organized YOU NAME IT (2008-2021), Huber’s first solo show in North America, featuring all the work from Demounting Louis Agassiz. The major exhibition is currently touring multiple countries, will be accompanied by a book of commentary by international scholars, curators and critics, and includes two new portraits. Tailoring Freedom (2021) combines for the first time Huber’s signature stapling method with photography. After printing the Renty and Delia daguerréotypes on wood, she used an air-pressured staple gun to clothe them in outfits inspired by iconic abolitionists. Renty’s suit is patterned after one worn by Frederick Douglass, and Delia’s dress after one worn by Harriet Tubman. The intricate staplework resembles brocade, suggesting royalty, while the dark backgrounds and metallic shimmer of thousands of staples evoke the sacredness of religious icons. Using staples to stitch history’s wounds is “a way of imagining a freedom for them that they didn’t have,” Huber explained, “and also like creating this shield. The staple metal becomes like an armor to protect them.”

She sees a direct connection between the art, which she has gifted to Lanier, and Lanier’s lawsuit, both attempts towards posthumous liberation. “I have been thinking about Tamara, who’s fighting for the freedom of her ancestors, literally a ‘freedom suit’,” Huber notes. “One of the ways to gain freedom is on behalf of somebody else.” Though she’s ready to close the chapter on Agassiz, she’s considering dressing the other photographed individuals. “One woman will be in Sojourner Truth’s dress. And so it becomes a kind of a celebration of people who were able in their lifetimes to become free. They are symbolic, standing in as those who represent the freedom we would wish for everybody.”

YOU NAME IT will be on display at Autograph (London, UK) November 10, 2022-March 25, 2023, coinciding with the release of the book, You Name It(November 2022), and Turku Art Museum (Turku, Finland) June-September 2023, with dates in Switzerland and USA to be confirmed; check the artist’s website.

This story was originally published July 13, 2022 10:00 AM.