Vita brevis, ars longa was the motto used by numerous writers from Switzerland and abroad to contribute their more or less extended poems whereby they helped to fund and realize the Kunsthalle Bern. Ariane Epars rediscovered this long-forgotten collection as she was doing research for her own exhibition here. In her works Ariane Epars always enquires into the specific characteristics of the gallery spaces placed at her disposal. This is how she describes her approach: ‚The gallery and its confines remain undefined as long as I do not engage with them. The space is like a kind of container. When I begin to work in or with a space I walk about in it, I measure it, I describe it, and I find out about its history, slowly defining it by my words, words which begin to delimit it, turning it into a place, a location.’ (Ariane Epars in conversation with Christian Gaenshirt, Berlin 1999) Remaining true to her usual approach, before designing and realizing her specific intervention at the Kunsthalle Bern, Ariane Epars studied the relationship between architecture and artists, architects and architecture, container and content, between the visible and invisible elements.