Sell Us Your Liberty or We'll Subcontract Your Death is a 2008 series of large-format lumber crayon rubbings of architectural signage of Northern California-based entities engaged in the everyday production of war. The title comes from a pseudonymous comment left on Wired's Threat Level blog.

The rubbings document the sites of entities in the Bay Area involved in activities including militaryindustrial development and production, illegal surveillance, remote sensing, and war profiteering. Many of these organizations are located in business parks. This activity was inspired by AT&T technician Mark Klein's whistleblowing on the collusion between AT&T and the NSA in warrantless domestic internet surveillance via data duplication and redirection, in a secret room at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco.

Sell Us Your Liberty or We'll Subcontract Your Death (2023) similarly surveys the architectural signage of companies in Switzerland that produce war materiel (war equipment and physical supplies), dual-use technology, and intellectual property for domestic military use and export under the policy of armed neutrality. These include Swiss companies and subsidiaries of international defense companies. In 2020, Switzerland exported war matériel to 60 countries.

As in the US, the white-collar and production backend of Swiss war production operates–to a degree–in plain sight, advertising wares, capacities, and business locations on rich websites and via “monument” signs fronting HQs and satellite production sites. While dwarfed by the US' defense industry, which sells 40% of war materials globally, in 2022 Switzerland exported $1 billion USD in war materiel and weapons.

In 2023, the Swiss weapons industry operates in the geopolitical context of Russia's war in Ukraine, Switzerland signaling the intention to join the European Sky Shield Initiative joint air defense system, and increasing arms exports to Qatar and the Middle East, all set against the question of the future of permanent armed neutrality.


Amy Balkin is an San Francisco based artist whose works propose alternatives for conceiving the public domain outside current legal and discursive systems, addressing property relations, environmental justice, and equity in the context of climate change.

Courtney Jaeger defines themselves as an exhibition space with changing physical locations. For the first exhibition they are delighted to open our office at Dornacherstrasse 270, the former premises of Tschantré in Gundeldingen. The show is curated by their dear friends Hagen Eberle and Matthias Holznagel, so-called „Fondation Tschuess“.

In collaboration with Amy Balkin, the Sell Us (2023) rubbings were acquired by Fondation Tschuess and Courtney Jaeger from publicly accessible signs across Switzerland.