The duo formed by the Polish Dorota Gawęda and the Lithuanian Eglé Kulbokaité is the winner of the latest edition of the Collide international artistic residency award, convened in October 2021, and in which 388 project proposals from 75 different countries have been presented. With a very remarkable diversity and quality. The artist duo, based in Basel (Switzerland), has been awarded along with three other honourable mentions: the Indonesian filmmaker, Riar Rizaldi; the New Zealand-based collective, The Observatory Project, and the Colombian based in Barcelona, Maria Paz.
Since 2019, the artistic program Arts at CERN (of the European Center for Nuclear Research) and the Barcelona City Council, within the framework of the Barcelona Science Plan, have worked together to promote dialogue between art and science at the highest level. In this unique collaboration framework, the international Collide Award is announced. The award-winning artists will be invited during 2022 to a two-month artistic residency at CERN, in Geneva, to work with its scientific community of excellence. They will then continue their residency for another month at the Hangar, visual arts research and production center of Barcelona, where they will also be able to contact and dialogue with the city’s scientific and artistic community and laboratories.
Winning project
Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė have been working together since 2013. Their multifaceted practice navigates between performance, fragrance, installation, sculpture, video and painting, all rooted in feminist theory and fiction. The winning entry for the 2021 Collide Award is titled Gusla, which translates from Polish as witchcraft and derives from her rural folklore. The artists are deeply inspired by fundamental physics, especially that quantum physics in relation to living organisms exposes the strangeness of the world: “We hope that the engagement with quantum physics has the potential to break the normative patterns of human behaviour, and negotiate new ways of relating to the natural world”, they comment. His research awakens speculative worlds and fictions by engaging with concepts of fundamental physics and drawing on summons rituals from Eastern Europe.
Regarding the honourable mentions of the Collide Prize 2021, they will be invited to participate in the program Guest Artist of Arts at CERN, with a short stay at the center to research ideas that can support their proposals.
The jury for this third edition of the award has been made up of Mónica Bello, curator and head of Arts at CERN, Geneva; Valentino Catricalán, curator of SODA Gallery, Manchester; Lluís Nacenta, director of Hangar, Barcelona; Rosa Pera, independent curator, Barcelona; and Helga Timko, accelerator physicist at CERN, Geneva.
Collide in Barcelona
The international residency program Collide was created by CERN in 2012 as a framework between CERN and cities that have a commitment to science. Since 2019, Barcelona has received the Collide Award, thanks to a three-year alliance between Arts at CERN and the Barcelona City Council framed in the Barcelona Science Plan. With the aim of fostering the creative link between art, science and technology, the people or groups awarded the award have the opportunity to carry out a two-month residency at CERN and a one-month residency in a factory for the creation of Barcelona.
In the first edition of this collaboration, in 2019, the winner was the Dutch artist glitch art Rosa Menkman, who carried out her combined residency at CERN and Fabra i Coats, Barcelona’s Creation Factory and Contemporary Art Center. Regarding the Collide Prize 2020, the winners were the members of the collective Black Quantum Futurism, which last December carried out their residency in Barcelona at Hangar, Center for the Production and Research of Visual Arts. Regarding his residence at CERN, due to COVID-19, it has been divided into two stages: a first that took place last fall and a second stage scheduled for 2022.