Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Nina Kerschbaumer
2025-2026
Discipline(s)
Anthropology and ethnology; Others; Sociology
Theme(s)
Behavior & Cognition; Cultural Studies; Visual Arts
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Nina Kerschbaumer is an artist and filmmaker whose work spans multiple media, with a sustained focus on documentary film, television formats, and collaborative practices. Her current research explores the systemic nature of violence and its relation with prosperity.
Nina received her PhD in Philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (AT) in 2024. Her doctoral research examined domestic crime as a medial phenomenon, with particular attention to the rise and cultural function of the True Crime genre across indexical media. Before joining the Collegium, Nina was a fellow at the Istituto Svizzero in Milan (IT), where she investigated the aftermaths of political violence during the 1970s.
Research Project
Amok: Anatomy of the Normal
This project investigates forms of violence within Western democracies, focusing on the interrelation between individual acts, political dynamics and white middle-class identity. Specifically, it explores amok—a relatively recent phenomenon of extreme, gender-specific violence—as a potential lens through which to unfold a certain double character of the current social order.
Using real case studies from Switzerland dating back to 1986 and examining crime prevention strategies for managing such cases in the future, the project seeks to approach the considerable area in which the complex causality of contemporary mass murder can neither be precisely calculated nor fully comprehended. At this moment, when reasons elude the classical disciplines and their logic of utilization—natural sciences, behavioral sciences, modern criminology—what can artistic practice add?
Drawing on two predecessor models analyzed—the medialized serial killer and the anonymous neo-fascist terrorist, both sharing notable features with the amok runner—and by appropriating modes of early reality TV, the research results in fictional episodes with exemplary figures not defined by deviance, but by norm. With this method, the project seeks to test the possibilities of seeing despite the impossibilities of showing, thus highlighting the relevance of artistic practice in times of bewilderment.
Research Interests:
political violence; mass violence; gender and violence; white masculinity; middle-class identity; Western democracy; criminology; crime prevention; artistic research; reality TV; media studies.