Winners of Collide and Accelerate awards and Guest Artists
The recipients of the Arts at CERN artistic residency awards, Collide Geneva and Accelerate Finland, are Yann Marussich and Erich Berger, respectively. Both artists will be invited to spend time at CERN next year and to engage in dialogue with physicists, engineers, IT professionals and staff of the Laboratory in order to further their artistic explorations.
This is the fifth Collide Geneva artist-in-residence award made possible by partnership between Arts at CERN, the Republic and Canton of Geneva and the City of Geneva. This year the award has been dedicated to dance. Yann Marussich’s proposal, ‘D’Air’, was selected for its intention to develop a levitation device that he and the music collective L’Ensemble Batida could use to perform the resulting work from his three-month residency.
Yann Marussich, a unique practitioner of contemporary dance. Since 1989, his choreography and performances have been presented all over the world. In 2001 Yann Marussich choreographed Bleu Provisoire, his first totally motionless piece. Since then, his work has deepened in introspection, exploring the control of stillness while placing his body in direct contact with diverse outside factors. His most recent performances have been presented in many festivals in Switzerland and abroad. They include several collaborative efforts: L’Arbre aux Clous (The Tree of Nails) and Glassed (2011), both with the industrial music pioneers Carter Tutti (formerly of the group Throbbing Gristle); Hyphos with students from the Geneva University of Art and Design; and PÔ in collaboration with Vincent Barras (2012). In 2008 he won an Ars Electronica prize in the Hybrid Art category.
Accelerate Finland, organised in partnership with the curatorial platform Capsula (art-science-nature) and with the support of Saastamoinen Foundation and TJNK, is a country-focused programme set up to foster exchanges between the arts and sciences in different countries. The residency lasts for a month, during which period Erich Berger will develop his winning project proposal, ‘Spectral Landscapes’. His aim is to research naturally occurring radioactive processes produced in a landscape and how they can be captured by detection techniques. In this project, he will use the landscape of Sápmi in the northern sub-Arctic part of Finland as the setting to observe the changes in the territory over time and to find ways through which to experience them.
Erich Berger is a visual artist, trained in philosophy and as a communication engineer. He has produced interactive art installations, artistic wearable interfaces, audiovisual performances and sound-art, which have been shown internationally since the mid 90ties. He also works as educator, curator, content developer and facilitator, with a focus on the intersection of art, science and technology. His research engages with hybrid space and hybrid ecology, the technologically informed environment and deep time processes. Berger also curates exhibitions and facilitates interdisciplinary environments for working and learning and closely cooperates internationally with partners from the arts and sciences.
In 2020, the Guest Artist programme, which invites artists for short visits to CERN to explore ideas related to art and science, will host nine international artists: Rosa Barba (Italy), Ben Frost (Australia), Mathilde Lavenne (France), Armin Linke (Italy), and Daniel Moreno (Spain), as well as the Collide International Honorary Mentions, Samoa Remy (Switzerland), Gabriella Torres-Ferrer (Puerto Rico), Addie Wagenknecht (USA) and Nathan Witt (United Kingdom).