Dorota Gawęda and Egle Kulbokaitė: first month of their Collide residency
Last May, the artist duo completed the first month of their Collide residency at CERN. Ahead of their upcoming residency in Barcelona this fall, they reflect on their encounters with the scientific community and their project Gusla.
After the first month of the residency at CERN, we are thinking in more detail about our proposed project Gusła, with which we would like to investigate the blurring boundaries and look into the unknown, aiming at challenging the illusory promise of a subjectivity as a whole and separate from the environment which is individually perceived and societally imagined.
We are interested in how quantum and particle physics introduced an instability of knowledge into the scientific world and opened up the scientific vocabulary to certain traits of weirdness akin even to magic. During May, we met a number of theoretical and experimental physicists with whom we could discuss the fundamental curiosity that drives scientific research and parallels that of artistic creation.
‘We discussed the fundamental curiosity that drives scientific research and artistic creation’
Drawing on Eastern European summoning rituals but also engaging with concepts and processes of physics, Gusła's research calls forth speculative worlds without separation of past, present and future, the human and non-human, the technological and natural forces, the living and the (un)dead. The new work we aim to create will focus on soil, a barrier to the underground experiment site and an underworld, the domain of the demons, as carriers of a prose, a narrative, and the substrate where everything is inscribed.
Throughout conversations and visits to sites such as HiLumi, DUNE, LHC detectors CMS and ATLAS, and experiments as CLOUD or n_TOF, we collected several stories of movements up and down, transgressing boundaries and connecting the universe with the fundamental components of ourselves and immediate and distant surroundings.
Collide is Arts at CERN's international residency programme, in collaboration with the city of Barcelona (2019-2021).
Text by the artists.