Una qüestió de matèria. La desconstrucció de cadenes microscòpiques a l’espai transnacional

Over the last decades, new architectures and infrastructures for containing and artificially reproducing the conditions at the very beginning of the Universe have surfaced across the world: a synthetic replica of the early Universe on Earth.

These sophisticated technospaces are sealed chambers that recreate specific and inexistent physical conditions on Earth to reveal the origin of matter. They spread throughout a subterranean global chamber system:  an invisible underground network.

New supranational laboratories like CERN transformed physics into a force within politics, creating new spaces of negotiations and agreement. Subatomic particles are questioning the Standard Model of Particle Physics while scientific infrastructures simultaneously challenge previous models for political and social structures.

The tiny monastic laboratory of the seventeenth century has been replaced by a global technoscientific infrastructure spread across the world. The elementary particle physics infrastructures involve massive urban complexes, buildings, and chambers, designed to host the invisible. These hybrid urban environments are comprised of scientists, particles, liquids, data, politics and technologies working together for the production of knowledge, and to translate a world not perceptible to humans.

The transnational network of Particle Physics underground laboratories is constructing a new scientific architecture around the world: a sensing architecture, which amplifies new political and material interactions.  Maybe, we can say that every new scientific experimental chamber is the architect of a new epoch of hybrid systems of transnational and transhuman collaborations. 

This text is part of a larger project conducted through a practice-led PhD in Arts and Sciences at the BxNU Institute (Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and Northumbria University).