Schwemmgut

No ideas but in things. William Carlos Williams‘ words stand for a biography of an unusual kind. Reto Gadola photographs a small house on the outskirts of Zurich — its rooms, objects, and everyday things — and lets them speak: as testimony to their inhabitants, as vessels of memories and ideas that reveal themselves to the attentive eye. Charles and Ray Eames called this process «select and arrange» — the act of finding and arranging as a genuine act of cognition. Reto Gadola follows this trail with the precise, curious gaze of the documentary photographer. A gaze that invites you to pause and look.

Schwemmgut (flotsam) has accumulated over the course of Arthur Rüegg’s life. Rüegg is an architect, researcher, emeritus professor of architecture at ETH Zurich, and recipient of the Swiss Grand Prix in Art, the Prix Meret Oppenheim. In his house he has gathered what was «washed ashore» during research in everyday life, on study trips, or while browsing second-hand shops: design objects and furniture, material samples and prototypes, books, paintings, drawings, and photographs by significant architects, designers, and artists of the twentieth century — and by those with no names. The family home thus becomes a universe that bears witness to the daily lives of its inhabitants and their dialogue with high culture and folk culture alike.