Long Throws

History of the work

On the courtyard facade of the Breitenrain school at Breitenrainstrasse 42, basketballs are lodged in the windows. The City of Bern describes them as blue and bronze-coloured and lists the work as 'Weitwürfe' (Long Throws) by Kotscha Reist and Sibylla Walpen from 2007. A brochure by Stadtbauten Bern and Wikimedia Commons call it 'Weite Würfe'; a photo there shows a worn red ball and a blue one.

According to the brochure, the work belongs to the conversion of the school and takes up two things: the mirror-image layout of the building and the childhood experience of a ball flying through a window pane. Each of the two halves of the building is assigned a ball in a complementary colour. Each ball appears four times along an imagined flight path straight through the building: in the stairwell window, as fragments in wall and ceiling, and finally in the small garden.

The architect Carl Haller built the school in 1865 as a classicist sandstone building with two symmetrical halves, each with its own entrance and staircase. In 1880 one of the city's first gymnasiums was built at right angles to it. Both buildings are listed as worthy of protection. The gymnasium was renewed in 2003/04; in 2006/07 Rykart Architekten renovated the school, removed the toilet annexes of 1926 and 1938 and fitted an assembly hall with 80 seats into the roof storey.

Kotscha Reist, born in Bern in 1963, trained as a photographer and studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam; he returned to Bern in 1993. The artists' lexicon SIKART describes him as a painter whose pictures are based on photographs and mentions his work for the Kunstraum Kiosk in the Lorraine district. Sibylla Walpen, born in Visp in 1969, works according to SIKART with mixed media, objects, photography, video and installation. Together the two had made the work 'Nostos' for a bank in the Aletsch region in 2004.

On site it is worth counting the balls and following their flight path from the stairwell window to the garden.

Researched and summarised by Bärn Kit. Sources: Kultur Stadt Bern, Kunst im öffentlichen Raum (offene Daten) · Stadtbauten Bern: Umbau und Erneuerung Volksschule Breitenrain (Broschüre) · SIKART: Kotscha Reist (Konrad Tobler) · SIKART: Sibylla Walpen · Wikimedia Commons: Installation Weite Würfe (Sibylla Walpen & Kotscha Reist 2007)