Arts at CERN

Quantum Prelude connects the realms of quantum physics and ancestral Indigenous cosmogonies, drawing on Candiani’s artistic research at CERN.

For more than a decade, Candiani’s practice has spanned the fields of art, science, literature, architecture, and music. She has developed a multimedia body of work with a particular interest in early technologies and their role in shaping knowledge. In 2020, she was awarded an Honorary Mention of the Collide Award. This gave her the opportunity to participate in a short exploratory residency to expand her practice through engagement with CERN’s community and research.

During her stay, Candiani visited and filmed several experimental facilities, conversing with physicists and staff working across the Laboratory’s broad scientific programme. Yet her main focus was examining the vast archive of CERN’s history. Cani approaches historical records and archives as weaving materials, intuitively threading traces of the past into new forms of materialization. Site-specific projects, shaped by the particular historical and social contexts, are also a hallmark of her work.

Her residency laid the foundation of Quantum Prelude, which premieres at her current solo show ​​Like a Trace, Its Sound at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City. The sound action for voices and instruments is situated at MUAC’s Espacio Escultórico (Sculptural Space) in Mexico City. The circular, megalithic monument, circumscribed by 64 triangular prisms, mirrors the presence of 64 musicians performing in the space, orchestrating their sounds as a living score. The two-channel video installation draws a parallel between the Sculptural Space and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, creating a striking visual narrative with archival images of early particle detectors. A poetic narration on the universe, alongside a musical composition by Rogelio Sosa, complements the visual imagery.

Described by Candiani as a ‘choreographic narration,’ the sound action replicates the arithmetic, geometrical and harmonic qualities of music—reflecting the laws of physics and the organizing principles of the cosmos. Ultimately, the sound action intertwines different paradigms of understanding life, drawing connections between ancestral Indigenous cosmogonies and the narratives of quantum physics.

Candiani’s research also culminated in the sculpture Supersymmetry, installed on the rectangular water surface at the entrance to MUAC. In physics, supersymmetry is a proposed extension of the Standard Model of Particle Physics that predicts a partner particle for each elementary particle. This theory seeks to address some of the Standard Model’s unresolved questions, including the nature of dark matter—the enigmatic substance that makes up 85% of the universe’s matter—and the mass of the Higgs boson.

Candiani draws inspiration from a photographic image from a cloud chamber experiment. This early particle detector made visible subatomic particles by capturing their paths. In the water mirror, aluminium structures evoke these particle tracks, their movements reflected on the water surface, alluding to the yet-to-be-discovered ‘superpartners’ of fermions and bosons.

Quantum Prelude and Supersymmetry are on view at Like the Trace, its Sound, the first major exhibition showcasing Candiani’s work from 2012 to the present. Featuring sculptures, paintings, drawings, visual installations, and archival pieces, the show explores the intricate intersection of phonic, graphic, linguistic, symbolic, and technological language systems. It is on display at MUAC until 27 November 2022.