EGO in Spoleto at Festival dei Due Mondi with a work by Lulù Nuti

Born out of an artistic residency at the European Gravitational Observatory in Cascina (PI), home to Virgo, one of the three largest and most sensitive gravitational wave detectors on the planet, Lulù Nuti‘s project, IN MY END IS MY BEGINNING, curated by Spazio Taverna and EGO and supported by the CAOS laboratory of the University of Perugia and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), was born.

During her residency at EGO, Lulù Nuti collected inspirations from the world of gravitational astronomy, fundamental physics and technological research and engaged in a dialogue with researchers from EGO and Virgo, starting from questions, aspirations and processes that are, in some ways, shared. The work, the restitution of this significant path of dialogue and mutual transformation, will be inaugurated today, June 28th at 5pm, on the occasion of the Festival Dei Due Mondi, at Palazzo Collicola, home of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna of Spoleto, Umbria’s main museum structure dedicated to modern and contemporary art.

“Artists, like scientists, ask questions that no one else has ever asked before, driven by curiosity and the desire to interpret the world,” said EGO Director Massimo Carpinelli. “On the basis of this shared motion of the spirit, I believe that a research path between artists and scientists can arise, which can mutually inspire us and help us develop new ideas and original imagery to understand and interpret contemporaneity. I am convinced that this effort should be part of our mission as research institutions.”

The residency is the first stage of a series of encounters between science and art that the European Gravitational Observatory is imagining and planning with Spazio Taverna in Rome, with the aim of developing the encounter between the scientific and artistic worlds and the production of works that can be the restitution of the dialogue between the two worlds.

IN MY END IS MY BEGINNING is a work that well condenses the artist’s tension towards the investigation of the world around her and at the same time aims to reflect on a similar tension in the daily work of hundreds of researchers who are listening to the deep universe. The work recalls ancient symbols (uroborus/toroid/flower of life) that preceded scientific investigations but which, in their being analogical and non-analytical, almost seem to anticipate some of the most acclaimed contemporary theories: the self-generation and self-sufficiency of a universe that is self-propagating to infinitely repeat a cycle of expansion and contraction; the symmetry of a gravitational field at rest and the vertigo that the imagination feels when depicting the curvature of space-time; as well as the coming and going of light rays that run along Virgo’s arms and are reflected on the interferometer’s mirrors to record unimaginable mutations in the fabric of the universe. The sculpture, resting on itself and raised a few centimetres off the ground, delicately and elegantly evokes a universe that could be nothing more than a simulation and yet exists, not only as an object to be investigated, but as a place to be inhabited.

The residency at EGO was also supported and accompanied by researchers from the CAOS Laboratory, founded by the University of Perugia (Department of Physics and Geology) and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, for the research and development of new frontier technologies related to the future large European gravitational wave detector, Einstein Telescope.