Meditation Room
Installation vidéo, 2001 / 18 min / 3 écrans flottants / Atlantis Gallery, London Institute, Londres.
I filmed The Meditation Room with 11 physicists, including Jack Steinberger, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics. At the request of the London Institute, a handful of international artists were invited to the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, to get acquainted with their avant-garde technology for an exhibition on the invisible.
It was the CERN which handled the business of choosing the physicists for the filming, the ones reckoned to be the best. My questions were philosophical and ambiguous, like: “Describe death in very precise terms; Do you think that speed can save the world?; When beauty meets coldness, what happens?”, and so on and so forth. They were in complete control of themselves, and in a competitive atmosphere. It was a real struggle to get them to loosen up. It is a work about the “complexity of the human soul”, where there is a shift from beauty to the pleasure of manufacturing bombs, from paradise to vaporised bodies, from enforced secrecy to a summer-night’s stars…