dpr-barcelona, book, ISBN 978-8412494266, English, 288 pages, 2025, Spain

Establishing Arts at CERN has been a courageous undertaking, as producing artworks within a programme directly linked to the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, consistently combining highly specialised knowledge with artistic freedom, was far from straightforward. The first artists visited in 2012, and since 2015 the programme was led for ten years by Mónica Bello. Bello is editing this celebratory book, which elegantly uses the opportunity to open its content, rather than self-reflect on the remarkable work achieved, reflecting the dialogues that took place during the artists’ residencies with the scientists. In the Spaces Between features guest essays, stories, and visuals from the developed artworks, organised into four sections: ‘quantum’, ‘cosmology’, ‘experimentation’, and ‘the unknown’. The perceivable exchange appears to be based on similar “modes of inquiry”. Among the many artists and theorists involved, some are well known in media arts, such as Antoni Muntadas, Gianni Motti, José-Carlos Mariátegui, Julius von Bismarck and Benjamin Maus, Raqs Media Collective, Rosa Barba, Rosa Menkman, Ryoji Ikeda, Semiconductor, Suzanne Treister, Tania Candiani, Yunchul Kim, and others. The programme also collaborated with the Prix Ars Electronica through their joint Collide@CERN award, and later the programme itself received the festival’s S+T+ARTS Grand Prize for Innovative Collaboration. The new curator and head of Arts at CERN, Giulia Bini, has already begun to expand and enhance the programme, for example with a new Collide residency in Stockholm through the Nobel Prize Museum, to nurture and sustain these precious dialogues.