‘Still waters run deep.’

A red boat rises vertically from the River Limmat, its bow pointing skywards, its stern borne by the current. Tilted slightly against the flow, it stands in the water as both a poetic gesture in the present and a placeholder for historical events that might once have unfolded at this very site.

At the core of the work lies an engagement with the Helmhaus Zurich, the Reformation, and the Anabaptist movement. In preparation, Olivia Wiederkehr attended a lecture by Christian Scheidegger, lic.phil., Deputy Head of the Rare Books Collection at Zurich’s Central Library. He spoke about the beginnings of the Zurich Reformation – which may be seen as a revolution – and about the “Radicals”, later known as the Anabaptists, exploring the reasons for the schism and the subsequent decades of persecution. This encounter resonated with Wiederkehr’s own biography, as she herself grew up in an Anabaptist Free Church.

The figure of Huldrych Zwingli is inscribed into the image of the boat: a man navigating the turbulence of political, theological and social forces. Zwingli is regarded as a principled reformer, advancing his cause step by step whilst negotiating conflicting fronts. In his early years he shared the conviction of the Anabaptists that baptism should follow personal faith and that infant baptism was not biblically grounded. Yet only months later he revised this stance, likely under political pressure, and turned against them.

This rupture had far-reaching consequences. His writings reveal his ambivalence: on the one hand, he confessed that he prayed for lenient verdicts for his former companions; on the other, he endorsed their persecution as necessary for maintaining civic unity. Thus, even Zurich’s comparatively restrained council became the stage for trials, sentences and executions. Many Anabaptists were drowned – death by water as a grim inversion of their own belief.

The Limmat itself became the site of these sentences. Historical sources locate the so-called “Water House”, from which executions were carried out, near today’s Bauschänzli. The condemned were drowned, often on the level of the Rathaus, situated directly opposite the Helmhaus. If a person survived until this point, it was interpreted as a sign of divine grace, and clemency could be granted. The river thus holds within it a submerged layer of collective memory, tied to violence and suppression.

The red boat responds to this history without illustrating it directly. It embodies the ambivalence of Zwingli himself: the reformer oscillating between steadfast principle and political compromise, between religious freedom and civic order, between personal concern and public severity. The boat leans, resists the current, asserts its presence – and at the same time points to the fragility of decisions made at the intersection of faith, politics and power.

In this way, the work interlaces personal memory, historical inquiry and spatial gesture. By situating the boat within sight of the historical sites of persecution, it renders visible how history remains inscribed in landscapes and urban spaces. It invites reflection on continuity and rupture – and on how religious and political decisions of the past still shape the conditions of our present.