Interrogating the ‘usefulness' of objects

The installation is part of the College of Humanities’ (CDH) Culture program, which each year since 2011 has invited an artist to present a work at the Rolex Learning Center that plays with the identity and the uses of the building itself.

Reist, whose art focuses on the world of work, be it industrial, administrative, or artistic, takes work objects and presents them to viewers in a new way to change their function and use. Inspired by the Rolex building itself as a continuous “ramp of concrete”, Reist chose to use masonry buckets of fresh concrete to remind people of the labor that went into the construction of this unique building.

“A lot of things that are built are still built manually,” she explains, “but there is a constant tendency to overlook and forget this work.”

The fact that the buckets are tipped over with the concrete spilling out makes them no longer ‘useful’ as work objects, raising the question about what is the moment do objects like these buckets stop being utilitarian and instead become, in this case, an object of art, or in other cases, trash.

“Objects like these cross the world, and then the final usage isn’t that important in the end,” Reist says.

As each bucket was tipped, the concrete within dried in its own unique way, based on its viscosity and the incline of the surface, making the 50 or so buckets both repetitive yet each slightly different. In some of the concrete pours, the artist placed bronze casts of bread and sausage as a reminder that most people work for a profit that often doesn't exceed minimum needs – just for ‘bread and sausage’.

Reist wants the students and other visitors to the Rolex library who come across La Rampe to pose the question of “what’s going on here?”. She wants them to question the purpose of such an installation.

“It’s not clear that this is an artistic installation,” she says. “And it’s always interesting to break people’s routine, to pose questions that we normally don’t throughout our days when everything goes normally.”

She also makes the comparison between artists and the many scientists working on EPFL’s campus. “Artists have a way of posing questions that is a lot different than scientists. We pose questions in a transversal manner, in ways that are non-conventional.”

Along with La Rampe, Reist will also create a performance piece at the Rolex Learning Center in May called using vacuum cleaners, bringing attention to the people who keep EPFL clean.