We find ourselves in a huge cylinder, floating horizontally six meters above the ground and crossed by a series of transparent parallelepipeds that, like the bridge of a spaceship, cross the Route de Meyrin on the outskirts of Geneva. It is one of the two parallel tubular bodies that rise from the sides of the road artery below and is part of the building designed by Renzo Piano for CERN The science portal“,”A unique place in the world” – as Fabiola Giannotti summarized it – “where you can experience science up close“.
Space Back to the Big Bang
Here it is Back to the Big Bang, a permanent place where visitors can understand and contemplate all the changes the universe has experienced. Experiments, projections and animations allow you to closely follow the history of the universe since the first stars and galaxies were formed.
The sponsor, supporter and financier of this project is the President of the Carla Fendi Foundation Maria Teresa Venturini Fendiwho thus tells us the circumstances under which it was conceived: “I first heard about the Science Gateway in 2018. The Director General of CERN, the extraordinary Fabiola Gianotti, told me about her idea to create it when we met on the occasion of the Carla Fendi STEM Prize, where she came to collect together with the two Nobel Prizes in Physics Englert and Higgs (the was responsible for the theory of the famous Higgs boson, the God particle, which was actually discovered at CERN in 2012). The project was still on paper, but the enthusiasm with which he described it immediately gave me the idea of involving the foundation in its implementation.”
In fact, Maria Teresa Venturini Fendi – at the helm of the foundation she founded since 2017 Carla Fendi Founded in 2007 to promote cultural and artistic events – as an admirer of Fontana, Burri and Manzoni and critical of the overly decorative and provocative aspects of contemporary art, she resolutely put science at the forefront, to the interests and goals of the institution, which she understands intuition , research and new art form.
Already at the various editions of the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, of which he is the main partner Since 2012, the foundation has offered exhibitions exploring the relationships between art and issues related to artificial intelligence, robotics, and other topicsexpanded reality. He presented for the 2023 edition Everything is numbersan interdisciplinary project that explores the connection between music and mathematics.
Art and science at the Carla Fendi Foundation
The spirit that permeates these initiatives seems to us to reflect the alternative epistemology of which he was the main representative Nelson Goodman and which aimed at unifying art, science, perception, representation, description, emotion and other symbolic systems and the ways in which they all contaminate and inform one another: because, it was said, understanding and creating go hand in hand, and the despotic dichotomy between cognitive (or scientific) and emotional (or artistic) no longer applies. And this is certainly the orientation that guides Maria Teresa Venturini Fendi’s decisions: “I grew up in a very creative environment and my education is humanistic. But I have always thought that art and science are not separate universes.
A path like the one suggested therein Back to the Big BangIn addition, it can also be seen as preparatory to understanding how contemporary art elaborates and interprets the major themes and categories of technology, through a method through which everything becomes accessible, playful and captivating, and science through its scholastic rigidity of freed from its cloak of abstraction. by the prejudice that describes it as a dry expanse of formulas. It is therefore not only a question of understanding, but also of feel Science that aims to incorporate the emotions of the audience, thus providing the basis for the development of aaesthetics scientific.
The intervention of the Carla Fendi Foundation in Geneva
““Back to the Big Bang” is a space that, at first glance, aims to inspire wonder at machines so complicated and yet capable of evoking such a sense of beauty“, Venturini Fendi points out, reminding us that this place can be visited in real life Chamber of Wonders of the year 2000, with an exhibition of “miracles” through which we can reconnect our present with prehistoric times and navigate to the distant shores of the future. And we can do all this with fun and passion, using sophisticated instruments to familiarize ourselves with the secrets of the cosmos… One could even say that here, after eight centuries, is the hope of Thomas Aquinaswhose teaching strategy was based precisely on wonder and who asserted that man exists Capax universes, has the ability to contain the universe. Here it is served, the universe, never before so close.
Alberto Mugnaini