Art: Delphine Reist pours buckets of concrete at EPFL

On a construction site, the mason’s bucket has a clear purpose: to transport mortar or cement. But what if it tips over? It loses its usefulness, and often ends up as waste. Or, more rarely, as art, like fifty or so black rubber bins, which will chorusly pour solidified concrete onto the floor of the Rolex Learning Center from EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne). For eight months, this installation orchestrated by Delphine Reist will occupy a slope of the flagship building of the campus, thus highlighting the singular topography of the places designed by the Japanese office SANAA.

The visual artist was invited by “Les Culturelles”, a festival of unity College of Humanities (CDH) – Culture aimed at exploring, from an artistic point of view, “some of the main challenges facing our world”. Called “La Rampe”, the sculptural proposal by the woman who lives and works in Geneva will be unveiled on Wednesday, October 9. It will be complemented by a second intervention, undoubtedly performative, on the theme of cleaning.

Undulating landscape

“I wanted to echo the very particular architecture of the building,” explains the blonde artist born in Sion in 1970 in her studio. “Everything is undulating, you go up and down like a walk in the countryside when you are in an open space. The walls are replaced by slopes and as a user of the place, you are immediately physically engaged, the experience is quite fascinating.” It is to this undulating landscape covered in carpets that “La Rampe” will respond, according to a design that remains to be defined.

“I will create it on site, in reference to both the undulating concrete sail that serves as a roof and follows the shape of the ground and to the circulation of people,” she continues. “The environment is always the first interlocutor of my work.” Delphine Reist has already presented a set of overturned buckets at Dunkirk in 2022 then in Tinguely Museum from Basel last year. “In Basel, for example, I played with the Rhine flowing below, on which ships transport a huge amount of materials; with the motorway not far away, we were at a crossroads of multiple flows.”

Flow is precisely what is at issue in “La Rampe”. As if belched out by buckets, the concrete spreads according to its own viscosity on the gray fabric that covers the floor of the Rolex Learning Center. It recalls the choreography of the 700 cement mixers that followed one another during the construction of the building in order to fill the immense roof shells: “I also wanted to echo this architectural moment”. The fact that fifty containers are overturned at the same time adds a certain comical repetition to the affair…

Vacuum cleaner ballet

The outlines of the artist’s second project remain vague. But it should be related to cleaning. “A building like this with so many people and, above all, these kilometers of carpet, requires constant vacuuming,” she says. “Two parallel worlds coexist: on one side, the maintenance team and on the other, the teachers and students, like two species in the same place that ignore each other.” This observation made Delphine Reist want to concoct a performance, which could feature a ballet of vacuum cleaners.

An offbeat, burlesque and slightly absurd idea that nevertheless questions the viewer: this is what characterizes the work of an artist who has studied the world of work and construction, its contradictions and its alienations. Diverting from their use banal tools and objects – office chairs, tires, drills, barrels, shopping carts – that she willingly sets in motion, she takes them out of their anonymity in a bizarre dysfunction that is as sonorous as it is enjoyable.

“This rather masculine theme has been present in my practice for a long time, it developed as I worked in buildings abandoned by the obsolescence of industry, such as slaughterhouses,” she emphasizes. “Recently, I have been looking at work outside of industry, home work, traditionally reserved for women, work that you can take home with you and do while looking after your children, sewing, knitting, shaping.”

His last hanging last spring at the Geneva gallery Lange + Pult has seen the blossoming of elements from the domestic sphere, graceful coffee cups in which small spoons swirl or the printing of fur collars in ink on paper. A new chapter, perhaps, but always served with a nice slice of critical sense.

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