FOYOU Kunstraum 2023

“Where do we come from?”
Recently, people have been trying to get to the bottom of this fundamental philosophical question with the help of physics. In Switzerland, deep underground, particles are accelerated to almost the speed of light in a kind of ring-shaped tunnel and brought into collision. The aim of these Big Bang experiments is to decipher the origins of the universe.
It is a gigantic high-tech undertaking by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) with corresponding financial and technical outlay. Thousands of scientists are looking for antimatter. The heart of their research facility is the world's largest particle accelerator with a circumference of 27 km and a depth of 100 m. The media repeatedly reports on the experiments surrounding the Large Hadron Collider, but the philosophical dimension of the events on site is rarely discussed. Since 2013, Passoth has repeatedly visited the place between Geneva and the Jura Mountains where the mystery of our existence is to be solved. He followed the circular movement of the particles on the site exactly above the LHC. Using a map provided by CERN, he headed to previously researched GPS coordinates at approx. About 1 km away and photographed there in the direction of its course.
This conceptual way of working is based on the scientific nature of physical experiments. The resulting photographs from The Circle Project respond with an unexpected poetry. They don't show how this world came to be. But they show what this world looks like, where one is on the trail of the greatest of all mysteries - the emergence from and disappearance into nothingness. It's an unspectacular upper world to a meaningful underworld. You can see fields with a wide horizon, dense forest, an abandoned football stadium, empty stretches of road, a motorway underpass or a brick bridge. In these photographs, Passoth not only endures the succinctness of simple existence, but in a reduced and harmonious design he creates images of a quiet matter-of-factness that contrast with the ambition of the accelerated particles beneath him. The photographs may be an expression of – as Passoth himself says – meditative and decelerated walking in circles, a humble indifference to what may come next. It is precisely then that things happen that you don't want to judge whether they are a coincidence or whether they reveal a higher level of meaning.
Passoth and the viewer of the photographs encounter the initial figure of the circle again and again: in the full moon, in a curve, in the line drawings of the sports field. In the center of the ring, the photographer pointed his camera at the earth and the sky. The photographs taken there show the perfect round shape of a dandelion and the circular movement paths of the stars.
Where are we going?

Cora Waschke

Rundblick

46.31057ºN 6.07141ºE

46.30955ºN 6.07919ºE

Wolkenkreis

46.30390ºN 6.09816ºE

46.30054ºN 6.10403ºE

Rotation

46.27060ºN 6.12074ºE

46.24992ºN 6.11050ºE

Helix

46.24574ºN 6.10612ºE

46.235970ºN 6.08141ºE

Suspected Center

46.23499ºN 6.06016ºE

46.24126ºN 6.03556ºE

Center found

46.24481ºN 6.02866ºE

46.25367ºN 6.01828ºE

46.28767ºN 6.01518ºE

46.294337ºN 6.02018ºE

o.T.

46.30056ºN 6.02893ºE

46.30532ºN 6.03852ºE

Map

FOYOU Kunstraum 2023