Connect: Selected artist 2025

Art+
© Tim Oosterlynck
© Tim Oosterlynck

Arts at CERN and Pro Helvetia announce Amanda E. Metzger as the artist selected for the latest edition of Connect. The artist will join a two-month residency at CERN.

Metzger’s artistic practice centres on network theory, authorship, and the complexities of unquantifiable data. Working across installations, videos, objects, and photographs, she explores how memories are created, measured, shared, and generated.

Supported by the Arts at CERN team, the artist will meet CERN scientists and visit the Laboratory with them for two months. By engaging with cutting-edge scientific research, they will explore new artistic forms, and develop Reconstructing Reality, a project that examines how collective identity and memories can be gathered, preserved, and reimagined through methods inspired by experimental physics.

Drawing from the data collection, storage, and lossy reconstruction processes of particle detectors, Reconstructing Reality will seek to reconstruct fragmented memories and build a decentralised, multi-bodied identity reflective of the artist’s vision. The work will culminate in a web-based platform where viewers can navigate interconnected, reconstructed memories through an interplay of text, video, audio, and graphics.

‘Art, with its kaleidoscopic nature, inspires shifting perspectives on how we engage with science. The artists in our programme excel at fostering new possibilities, and I am proud to host Metzger in our residencies. Her work and residency proposal truly embody this transformative quality, with CERN providing a remarkable setting for these ideas to unfold’, says Mónica Bello, head of Arts at CERN.

Now in its 8th edition, the Connect collaboration framework between Arts at CERN and Pro Helvetia has established itself as a vital platform for artistic engagement with physics and the scientific community at CERN. The programme has hosted artists such as AATB, Johanna Bruckner, Robin Meier, and Vimala Pons for residencies at CERN, and offered shared, dual residencies at CERN and partner scientific institutions in India, Chile, and South Africa to Rohini Devasher and Elisa Storelli, Shaliesh BR and Lou Masduraud, Marcela Moraga and Dominique Koch, and Kamil Hassim and Ian Purnell.

The jury of Connect was formed by Mónica Bello, curator and head of Arts at CERN; Giulia Bini, head of Program and curator of “Enter the Hyper-Scientific” at EPFL Lausanne; and Federica Martini, head of the Master Programme CCC – Critical Curatorial Cybermedia at HEAD Haute école d’art et de design Genève.

Connect: Residencies by Arts at CERN and Pro Helvetia

Launched in 2021, Connect is a collaboration between Arts at CERN and Pro Helvetia that promotes and supports dialogue between artists and scientists within the Laboratory’s context. Connect offers a national and an international format, both open to art practitioners from all disciplines supported by Pro Helvetia.

More information:
Arts at CERN