§ The Majorana Experiment
The Majorana Experiment comprises three films, a photographic constellation, photographs and historical documents that constitute an open narrative dispositif. The story fans out from an account of Ettore Majorana, a genius of Italian physics who disappeared at sea in 1938 under mysterious circumstances. A secret history of sorts, Majorana’s journey is as a shadow line, tracing the covert story of the creation of nuclear weapons. Majorana’s story became a myth after the publication in 1975 of Leonardo Sciascia’s novel The Vanishing of Majorana. The polemic generated by this publication spurred an impressive number of speculative theories, some more plausible than others, about the causes that pushed Majorana to cover up his tracks. One theory gained much currency over the years: Majorana orchestrated his own disappearance because of his anticipation of the deadly outcome of the discovery of nuclear fission.
The theory advanced in this body of work is speculative. Majorana operated a “quantum disappearance” on himself: a passage from an embodied existence to a multiplication of “eigenstates”, which can synchronically co-exist in different places, transcending the laws that link time and space. This elegant idea offers a vast territory for experimentation. It endows classical narrative with an open structure, in which Majorana’s uncertain journey becomes a time capsule, a container for narratives that subsequent historicizations can potentially bestow with meaning, and which, in the present context of nuclear weapons proliferation remains surprisingly relevant.
Majorana Eigenstates (from The Majorana Experiment), 2008
HD video, 1:2.35, colour, stereo, loop of 46′. Film still
© 2010 Marco Poloni, courtesy Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
Majorana Eigenstates (from The Majorana Experiment), 2008
HD video, 1:2.35, colour, stereo, loop of 46′. Exhibition view Kunsthalle Bern, 2010
© 2010 Marco Poloni, courtesy Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
Exhibition photograph: Dominique Uldry, Bern
In the main film Majorana Eigenstates, 2008, an actor who interprets Majorana – and who strangely resembles him – synchronically lives in two places: a hotel room in Napoli, where the real Ettore Majorana lived before vanishing at sea, and the cabin of a ship. The use of two cameras with a parallax gap generates a split filmic space.
Click here to view it on Galerie Campagne Première’s website
The Sea Rejected Me (from The Majorana Experiment), 2008
16mm film installation, 1:1.33 colour, silent, loop of 3’37”. Film still
© 2010 Marco Poloni, courtesy Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
The Sea Rejected Me (from The Majorana Experiment), 2008
16mm film installation, 1:1.33 colour, silent, loop of 3’37”. Exhibition view Kunsthalle Bern, 2010
© 2010 Marco Poloni, courtesy Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
Exhibition photograph: Dominique Uldry, Bern
A second film, The Sea Rejected Me, 2008, was found at a dealer of used cinema equipment in Tehran. The deteriorated film shows a man on the deck of a ship. The man’s resemblance to photographs of the physicist is striking. Like him, he plays chess and writes on what appears to be a cigarette pack.
Click here to view it on Galerie Campagne Première’s website.
The Sea of Majorana (from The Majorana Experiment), 2008
Super-16mm onto video, 1:1.66, colour, stereo, loop of 8’30”. Film still
© 2010 Marco Poloni, courtesy Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin.
The Sea of Majorana (from The Majorana Experiment), 2008
Super-16mm onto video, 1:1.66, colour, stereo, loop of 8’30”. Exhibition view Kunsthalle Bern,2010
© 2010 Marco Poloni, courtesy Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
Exhibition photograph: Dominique Uldry, Bern.
A third film, The Sea of Majorana, 2008, shows a post-nuclear seascape filmed between Napoli and Palermo, where Ettore Majorana disappeared in 1938. The ambient radioactivity perforates the material support of the film. A voice over reads an excerpt of an essay by Majorana, “The Value of Statistical Laws in Physics and Social Sciences.”
Click here to view it on Galerie Campagne Première’ website.
Domus Galilaeana, Majorana Fund, File 13-0122 (from The Majorana Experiment), 2009
LED lightbox. Exhibition view Kunsthalle Bern 2010
© 2010 Marco Poloni, courtesy Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
Exhibition photograph: Dominique Uldry, Bern.
A light box, Domus Galilaeana, Majorana Fund, File 13-0122, 2009, displays a document that contains a series of tables and numbers handwritten by Majorana in minute characters. The data describe the size and armament of military ships before World War II. At the time of his disappearance, Majorana was convinced of the imminence of a world conflict and believed that the war would be won or lost at sea.
Persian Gulf Incubator (from The Majorana Experiment), 2008
Archival Pigment Prints, 32 elements. Exhibition view Kunsthalle Bern, 2010
© 2010 Marco Poloni, courtesy Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
Exhibition photograph: Dominique Uldry, Bern.
The constellation of photographs Persian Gulf Incubator, 2008, narrates the finding of the wreck of the Italian luxury liner “M/S Raffaello” in the Persian Gulf. The ship was sold in 1976 by Italy to the Shah of Iran, and was sunk by Iraqi jetfighters in 1983, a few miles off the coastal nuclear reactor of Bushehr in the Persian Gulf. This facility much worries American and Israeli policy makers. In this narrative the ship is a space capsule that journeys over a historical period spanning from the 1973 oil crisis to the events of 9/11.
Prof. Otto Hahn’s Work Table for Neutron Bombardment of Uranium,
1938, Deutsches Museum Setup, München
Stereograph, wood, glass, mirrors, transparencies, LED light boxes
(from The Majorana Experiment), 2010
© 2010 Marco Poloni, courtesy Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin.
Prof. Otto Hahn’s Work Table for Neutron Bombardment of Uranium, 1938, Deutsches Museum Setup, München
Stereograph, wood, glass, mirrors, transparencies, LED light boxes
(from The Majorana Experiment), 2010 Exhibition view Kunsthalle Bern
© 2010 Marco Poloni, courtesy Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
Exhibition photograph: Dominique Uldry, Bern.
The stereograph Prof. Otto Hahn’s Work Table for Neutron Bombardment of Uranium, 1938, Deutsches Museum Setup, München, 2010, is a tridimensional photographic rendition of the experimental table on which O. Hahn studied the transmutation of uranium under neutron irradiation, in 1938 in Berlin. Lise Meitner, his former colleague, correctly interpreted the data from this pivotal experiment as indicating the nuclear fission of uranium. This is the core mechanism of the first atomic bombs.–
a very wobble unstable drop (fromThe Majorana Experiment), 2010
Historical documents; exhibition view Kunsthalle Bern, 2010
© 2010 Marco Poloni, courtesy Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
Exhibition photograph: Dominique Uldry, Bern
The collection of historical documents a very wobble unstable drop, 2010, presents the discovery of nuclear fission in the late thirties, from the intuition of its mechanism to its experimental proof. These texts provide a historical and scientific framework to Majorana’s disappearance..
Black Hole (from The Majorana Experiment), 2010
C-print from a Super-16mm film still, 65 x 100 cm
© 2010 Marco Poloni, courtesy Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
The photograph Black Hole, 2010, depicts a seascape perforated by a large hole. It punctuates the narrative dispositif with a straightforward image of erasure.
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§ The Analogue Island
The Analogue Island is a constellation of works that presently comprises two films, a book, photographs and a video work. This constellation is an investigation of power configurations in Sicily and their effects on its topography. This island – the geographical epicentre of the entire Mediterranean Sea – is read as a symptom and prototype of nation-wide malgovernance. This analysis also provides insights into the emergence of parasitic power networks at a larger scale.
Scomparsa delle lucciole (Disappearance of the Fireflies) (from The Analogue Island), 2011
S-16mm film on HD video, 1:1.66, colour, stereo, loop of 19′. Film still
© Marco Poloni, courtesy Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
Scomparsa delle lucciole (Disappearance of the Fireflies) (from The Analogue Island), 2011
S-16mm film on HD video, 1:1.66, colour, stereo, loop of 18’25”. Film still
Exhibition view Galerie Campagne Première Berlin, 2011
© Marco Poloni, courtesy Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
Exhibition photograph: Nick Ash, Berlin.
Scomparsa delle lucciole (Disappearance of the Fireflies), 2011, is an experimental narrative about the entanglement of power relationships between State and Mafia, set in a devastated region of Sicily. The film takes its title and its cue from a stark image proposed in 1975 by Pasolini, in an article that analysed power transformations in Italy and anticipated the spectacularization of politics. The film attempts to expand Pasolini’s poetic image by incorporating the Mafia, the obscure historical companion to State’s power. It articulates a number of concepts and narrative threads: the Mafia as faceless power, its impact on the urban landscape – in particular through unfinished architecture – and Sicily’s relationship to time and expenditure.
Click here to view it on Galerie Campagne Première’s website
The Analogue Dam (from The Analogue Island), 2010
S-16mm film on HD video, 1:1.66, colour, stereo, loop of 8’30”, and non synchronous voice-over, english, mono, loop of 22’23”. Film still
© Marco Poloni, courtesy Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
The Analogue Dam, 2010, explores the ghostly Sicilian dam of Blufi, one of the most impressive of a series of unfinished works of public architecture in the Italian south. Mismanaged and infiltrated by the Mafia, these uncompleted projects epitomize the difficulties of a certain “South” to take hold of its future, and call into question Robert Smithson’s concept of “ruins in reverse”. The filmic sequence loosely intersects with a voice-over that shifts from one angle to the next: descriptive, historical, political, aesthetic.
Click here to view it on Galerie Campagne Première’s website.
Ustica (from Palermo Noir & Yellow), 2011. Silkscreen
© Marco Poloni, courtesy Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
Palermo Noir & Yellow, 2011, an artist book published by onestar press in Paris, is a take on Palermo’s eighties, the so-called “years of lead” in which competing families of Cosa Nostra were engaged in a ruthless war for the control of the city. The book intersperses chronicle photographs found in the archives of Palermo’s leading newspapers with images of artworks and with pictures of fish, shellfish and pasta. As the quasi-farcical spectacle of death according to mafioso rites visually reverberates with some tropes of art, cuisine imagery is there to suggest that food, after all, is serious business.
Luci di presenza (Lights of Presence) (from The Analogue Island), 2011
C-prints from S-16mm film stills
© Marco Poloni, courtesy Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
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The work of Marco Poloni (1962, lives and works in Berlin) spans cinema, photography and installation. Over the past several years, Poloni has been building an index of plots and problems of the Mediterranean Sea. This archive documents and reformulates a number of geopolitical scripts and narratives of this area, focusing on relationships between social invisibility and power, subjectivity and ideology, individual agency and political change.