The context for the project called "An alternative history of Swiss chocolate" was the overall project "Re/fugium", which was intended to be political-artistic research into the "generation of the present". Re/fugium is an organization consisting of young artists, media professionals and social scientists, who came together in autumn 2015 to share their thoughts about their own generation. It was against this background that the idea arose of leaving their urban backgrounds for two months during the summer of 2016 to work on individual or collaborative projects in the broader context of their own generation and its identity. Several rooms in a disused chocolate factory in the Blenio valley in Ticino were made available to the group for that time.
In both its content and its methodology, "An alternative history of Swiss chocolate" was inspired by the ZHdK course "z-Lab: Hacking the Discourse – audio storytelling between fiction and nonfiction"/"Radiofeature – a project in dialogue with the SRF 2 Kultur channel". The aim of the seminar was to produce audio plays which attempted to challenge the dominant discourses in society, through the medium of narration.
The dominant discourse addressed by "An alternative history of Swiss chocolate" is that of Swiss neutrality. The idea was for a social sciences research project into the (colonial) history of Swiss chocolate, and a series of interviews and staged debates about this subject, to be reworked into an audio feature. By means of a kind of "food anthropology", it would draw attention to Switzerland's web of transnational relationships and to the invention and promotion of a national identity based on the adoption of the obviously non-indigenous cocoa bean. The societal relevance of the project lies in the way it attempts to show the construct nature of borders, (national) cohesion, tradition and identity.