In Poloni’s work the name “Ettore Majorana” symbolizes a certain affection, a feeling of being threatened by an abyss. An abyss of intrigues, a black hole, of atomic bombs, physics and politics. This black hole reminds me of Van Gogh’s yellow period or of Munch’s mad rotations – so different from the (moving or still) images of Einstein and his ideas in the Einstein Museum/Historisches Museum Bern which is situated only a few meters away from Poloni’s work at the Kunsthalle.

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For a certain time I was a character who helped authors to write about art and science.

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Two voices are needed, two bodies in the same room.
Both must be dramatic, foldable at the arms and knees,
like puppets or continents. Both must beware.
Words are collapsible, like chairs,
and the children will always laugh loudest.
 
Are little girls serpents, since both eat eggs?
Put that in your pipe, caterpillar, and smoke it.
Dividing a loaf with a knife, taking a dog from a bone,
this game is good, and will last for as long as
the two bodies stay, dramatic, absurd and brazen,
 
orchestral and exposed, as long as the two voices
carry the weight of needing to be understood,
as long as the room fills up with the irreversible
proof of eyes that never leave their faces
as they enact their comedy of decipherment.

Sampurna Chattarji

Archimedes lost his head to a corporal’s sword.
What sort of madness would one need to fall for numbers and stay intact?
Trying to understand love via tensor algebra, a sheet of obscure signs appears across the bed.
Don’t use the word infinity unless you mean it.

Sampurna Chattarji

Magnes: There was a time when people conceived me as a sort of key. A key to experiences of infinity, of the universe, of the sublime.

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It starts with something and with another thing, a hidden thing, something that is part of the beyond, that has contoures shaped by the known. The known is linked with suspect, with all that frightens us.

Anxiety: All that we cannot calculate.

When did calculation start?

When did the “great” distinction become productive, the distinction between male and female, active and passive, minus and plus, sun and moon, earth and sky, south – north, west – east?

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D.: I’ve never read Descartes to speak of. … I am not a Cartesian by pleasure. I happen to have been born a Cartesian. The French education is based on a sequence of strict logic. You carry it with you. *

*Eric Cameron: „Given”. In: De Duve, Thierry (ed.): The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp (Nova Scoatia College of Art and Design, Halifax Nova Scotia). Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991, p. 17.

D.: A game of Chess is a visual and plastic thing, and if it isn’t geometric in the static sense of the word, it is mechanical, since it moves; it’ s a drawing, it’ s a mechanical reality.*

* Eric Cameron: „Given”. In: De Duve, Thierry (ed.): The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp (Nova Scoatia College of Art and Design, Halifax Nova Scotia). Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991, p. 16.

The last post (Head as a vessel) on this blog was 1572nd post in this blog. Googling  1572 leads to SN 1572. The entry begins with: When Tycho Brahe was on his way home on November 11, 1572, his attention was attracted by a star in Cassiopeia.  Wikipedia speaks of Tycho’s Supernova … It burst forth in early November 1572 and was independently discovered by many individuals.