A matter of Matter. The Unmaking of Microscopic Bonds in Transnational Space.

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Blanca Pujals
PhD Candidate in Arts and Sciences

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The tiny monastic laboratory of the seventeenth century has been replaced by a global technoscientific infrastructure spread across the world.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).

Keywords:

scientific infrastructures, geopolitics, CERN, sensing architectures, transnational, transhuman.

Article Details

How to Cite
Pujals, Blanca. “A matter of Matter. The Unmaking of Microscopic Bonds in Transnational Space”. Artnodes, no. 25, pp. 1-10, doi:10.7238/a.v0i25.3320.
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(c) Blanca Pujals, 2020

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Author Biography

Blanca Pujals, PhD Candidate in Arts and Sciences

Blanca Pujals (Barcelona – London) is an architect, spatial researcher and critical writer. She got her BA in Architecture at Barcelona School of Architecture (Spain). She completed her studies with an MA in Critical Theory and Museum Studies at the Independent Studies Program of MACBA Museum tutored by the philosopher Paul B.Preciado. She was recently a postgraduate at the Centre for Research Architecture (Visual Cultures Department) directed by Eyal Weizman and Susan Schuppli, at Goldsmiths University of London. She is currently developing her practice-led PhD in Arts and Sciences at the BxNU Institute (Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and Northumbria University) and Cultural Negotiation of Science research group, about the geopolitics and aesthetics of the Fundamental Science infrastructures, based at Baltic 39. Her cross-disciplinary practice approaches geographies of power on bodies and territories. Her research is led through a critical spatial practice as a form of research to engage with questions of contemporary culture, philosophy of science and transnational politics, developing tools for undertaking analysis through different visual and aural devices. Her work is not limited to one medium; rather, it encompasses film, architecture as well as lectures, curatorial projects and critical writing. Her last recent film projects are ‘Specular Technologies’ (2015), ‘Bodily cartographies: Pathologizing the body and the city’ (text published in The Funambulist nº7, 2016) and ‘A Synthetic Universe’ (2016. Text Published in The Live Creature and Ethereal Things: Physics in Culture, by Arts Catalyst, 2018), and the curatorial project ‘Geographies and forms of power’ in Tabakalera (2017-2018). Blanca has worked on projects in Colombia, Iraq, UK, Afghanistan, Spain, Italy, US and Switzerland and she is also a regular contributor to art projects and exhibitions in Spain and UK. She gives lectures, teaches and publishes internationally.

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