Alma Cecilia Suarez

« Swiss, Schweizer, suisses, svizzeri » is a project developed during a one-year scholarship at Fabrica in 2015. It portrays six emblematic Swiss families chosen to provide an eloquent testimony of the diversity of the spoken languages, the various religious orientations and the many historical and geographical origins of the Swiss population, putting into perspective a Swiss identity defined by its differences.

The "case study families" were selected following interviews with Swiss historians at various universities in French-speaking Switzerland. After illustrating the oldest dynasties (such as von Reding from Schwyz, de Weck from Fribourg , Dufour from Geneva) and those who recently obtained Swiss nationality (such as Fantoni from Brig, Garcia from Zürich), a final chapter is dedicated to the future Swiss citizens who have started their naturalization process.

From family archives and reproductions of ancestors’ portraits to photographs of the descendants made in 2016, I built a certain visual genealogy specific to each family. The selected images are an extract of a wider work, which aims to show the various portraits and stories of Switzerland.