A house, a family, a village and memory
Isolated in the remote hills of Switzerland, ADF Fellow, Anne-Charlotte Gillard '25 unearthed history and profound connection.
By Anne-Charlotte Gillard '25
ADF Guest Blogger
Anne-Charlotte Gillard ‘25, a resident of Adams House pursuing a joint concentration in the History of Science and Art, Film, and Visual Studies, was awarded an Office for the Arts Artist Development Fellowship to research and create a multimedia book exploring the tangible and intangible impact of climate change in alpine Switzerland. As an intern for the Open Environmental Data Project, Gillard has conducted research on the accessibility of climate and environmental health data for use by governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, and communities to support community resilience and inform local environmental decision-making. She has also done research for Stephanie Morain at Baylor College of Medicine, Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy. Gillard is a member of Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard.
During the summer of 2023, with the support of the Office for the Arts at Harvard, I had the opportunity to explore themes of memory, place, erosion and deposition while living in my ancestor’s chalet in Cerniat, a village located in the Prealps of Switzerland.
I was born and raised in Houston, Texas, by parents who moved there from New Jersey and Switzerland, and the notion of intergenerational family and environmental memory, concepts that accompany longer-term settlement in a physical location, were foreign to me. Consequently, it has been difficult for me to derive a sense of place in Houston because of its constant physical transformation spurred on by forces of urbanization and natural disasters. Cerniat, alternatively, seemed like a more accessible place to access family and environmental memory as its identity—a landscape, a home and a village—has been less impacted by the dramatic character of urbanization that defines Houston’s past and present. Thus, I wanted to spend time in my ancestral home in Switzerland to better understand these themes and gain comfort with the slipperiness of place and memory-based research.
Located in the French patois-speaking region of Fribourg, my family’s 327-year-old decaying wooden chalet served as the village post office—the administrative lifeblood of remote mountainside villages—from the time my great, great grandfather, Théophile, a master mason, constructed the office until 2000, when the post was transferred to another family. My great uncle and his father were the village postmen, delivering mail and the news by foot or bicycle in the summer and by sled in the winter to farmers and villagers across the mountainside.
When I arrived in Cerniat, it became clear that the relationship—both past and present—between my family, this home and this landscape, would be difficult to fully understand and articulate despite the apparent affinity that seemed to connect these domains of place. Although the house was filled with heirlooms depicting the passage of time and histories of function, many of these objects felt out of context—either moved over the past 120 years by my great, great grandfather, Theophile; my great uncle Pascal of the Post, the last permanent resident of the home until his death several years ago; and my father, who has been sifting through and organizing the abundance of objects enveloped by seventy years-worth of dust rings in an attempt to determine the future of the decaying house.
My work was Influenced by the personal writing of Anthony Trujillo, my former teaching fellow and Harvard Ph.D. candidate interested in Indigenous and Native American studies. I was also influenced by the scholarship of Sven Haakanson, Jr., a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington and Curator of North American Anthropology at the Burke Museum in Seattle,. Haakanson visited my class last semester to discuss his work surrounding Alutiiq culture, language revival and code of ethics for museums. WIth these influences in mind, I began to revive the house in my own fashion, reactivating its objects, spaces and surrounding environment.
I turned towards the landscape and the village to recall history through memory. My process began with several conversations with Cerniat’s town historian, Gérard Andrey, who sat in his kitchen and recounted many stories of Cerniat and its people. He pulled out documents, town registries and photographs — materials he collected while researching the genealogy of his family and Cerniat’s other families, including my own, in 1958 at the age of thirteen.
As fascinating as it was to learn about my family and our home, one of the first constructed in the village, I was equally fascinated by Andrey’s life and his decades-long historical practice. A side project that persisted throughout his various occupations as a church sexton, agricultural worker and later as a banker, Andrey assembled a rich archive of Cerniat’s past by listening to stories and collecting documents from the canton’s churches and municipal buildings. Once the commune ceased conducting a census, Andrey continued to confirm Cerniat’s present reality by conducting a village census himself and by revitalizing a local village publication, Reflets de Cerniat. After speaking with Andrey, the link between Cerniat’s historical eras with regional environmental events become apparent, a relationship consistent with how my father recalls his memories of Cerniat as a child, delivering the post with his uncle and grandmother up the mountainside towards Les Mollards in the morning and down the valley on the Route du Vieux Moulin in the afternoons.
While the house was clearly a significant aspect of understanding family memory, the landscape and surrounding geology of our home became just as evident. Without a background in geology, especially of the Swiss Prealps, I began walking throughout the commune to familiarize myself with the area. I started with the old mail route, walking the 8 kilometers of the morning route and the 5 kilometers of the afternoon route. This expanded to hours of roaming Cerniat’s mountains, leaving from the backdoor of the house and navigating to the commune’s borders of Mont Bifé and the Vanil des Cours in the southwest, La Berra further north, and Les Echelettes just below the house to the south. By walking and observing the land, I identified environmental patterns specifically relating to water and erosion that resonated with my conversations with Andrey about flooding events and landslides that defined and organized Cerniat’s history. These geological themes resonated intimately with our family house both in the mirrored decay and deposition of objects within the house and the name of the house itself, “Perrevuet,” which I learned was likely derived from the Gruérien patois spoken in this region that translates into several meanings: a pile of rocks; the deposition of rocks from a landslide; or a specific type of thyme and/or oregano.
While I am still investigating familial, cultural, and environmental history and memory in Cerniat, I have turned most of my focus now to organizing and synthesizing my research into objects and publicly accessible forms through photography, charcoal and pastel drawings, creative writing and recorded interviews. My work is far from complete which is, in part, why I was excited to return to campus. I am thrilled to continue developing and incorporating what I have seen, heard, felt,and touched in Switzerland into my interdisciplinary studies and practices. I am eager to see what comes next.
