The Right to Forget is a short documentary film that investigates erasure, silence, and inherited memory through a family history tied to the Swiss gold trade, bank secrecy, and colonial entanglements. Beginning with the destruction of archives linked to the artist’s grandfather’s mining activities in the 1980s, the film traces what remains when documents, images, and testimonies have been deliberately removed. Moving through fragments, gaps, and indirect voices – including non-human presences such as the okapis brought to Basel by Mobutu Sese Seko – the project asks how histories are written, forgotten, or displaced. Through archival research, interviews, and site-specific filming in Switzerland, Luxembourg, and former Zaire, the film reflects on responsibility, remembrance, and the political conditions that enable forgetting.
Lisa Mazenauer is an artist working with film, installation, photography, and sound. Her practice explores memory, extractivism, and the construction of history through personal and collective archives.
