five students. Pipi remembers “endless
greenbrown alpine fields with mani
fold flowers and vivid little brooks melt
ing holes in snow blocks—also skiing
between my parents’ legs.” When Tom
was born, they moved from the moun
tains to the village of Grabs, in the
Rhine Valley, where her mother had
grown up, and then to neighboring
Buchs. “My mother was such a strong
lion, very generous and giving,” Rist
said. “She brought us up to look after
others, and she always said if someone
did something we liked we should go
quickly and make a compliment. On
holidays, she had us bring bread and
butter and honey to all the neighbors.
I thought that was a cool thing. My fa
ther was a depressed person, who always
had a new partner”—that is, a mistress.
“My parents’ marriage made me swear
I would never marry,” she said. Both
her parents were freethinkers. “My fa
ther liked outsiders better than Swiss
people, and considered Africans more
beautiful and intelligent than we are,”
she said. He was also a dedicated en
vironmentalist, who stopped heating
the family swimming pool because it
used too much energy. One summer,
Pipi, feeling unhappy and misunder
stood, spent several nights sleeping in
the empty pool, and going to her grand
parents’ house for meals.
Her parents separated, amicably,
when she was sixteen—her father moved
to the house next door, where he had
his medical practice and received his
mistresses, and Anna and the children
remained in the family home. That year,
Pipi fell in love with a boy in her school
named Thomas Rhyner. “Pipi was one
class behind me, and the only other per
son in the village who admired John
Lennon and Yoko Ono,” Rhyner recalls.
Music was their shared introduction to
popular culture. Secondstring English
rock bands (never the Beatles) used to
come and play at a hall just over the
border in Liechtenstein, and Anna,
newly released from her marriage, would
often let the musicians stay overnight
at her house. “To this day,” Rist told me,
“if my mother sees a backpacker who
looks a bit lost, she will say, ‘Do you
want to stay with us?’”
Rist left home in 1982, and spent four
years at the University of Applied Arts,
in Vienna. Swiss artists have tradition
ally gone elsewhere to learn and prac
tice their craft—Paul Klee to Munich,
Alberto Giacometti and Jean Tinguely
to Paris, Urs Fischer to Amsterdam and
New York. But Rist had no intention
of becoming an artist, commercial or
otherwise. She wanted to get out of
Switzerland and to study physics, which
had been her strongest subject in high
school, and she wanted to do so in a
Germanspeaking country. The univer
sity in Vienna, whose program was heav
ily influenced by Bauhaus inclusiveness,
offered a wide variety of courses in the
sciences and the humanities. She took
theoretical physics and philosophy, stud
ied illustration, photography, and commercial art, and became fascinated with
experimental cinema—the poetic, highly
personal films of Norman McLaren,
Stan VanDerBeek, John Waters, and
others. Rist made a few short films in
Super 8, and eventually decided that she
wanted to work with moving pictures
and sound and language.
After graduating, in 1986, she re
turned to Switzerland and registered
for video classes at the School of De
sign, in Basel. She chose video because
it allowed her to do everything herself,
from camerawork to editing. To pay for
her studies, she took parttime jobs with
CibaGeigy and HoffmannLa Roche,
the big Swiss chemical firms, which