The project of the Italian artist Margherita Morgantin for the Serralves Museum in Porto, on the occasion of The Museum as Performance, is titled COSMIC SILENCE (Fluorescence) and is part of the project VIP = Violation of the Pauli exclusion principle SOPRA LA MONTAGNA SOTTO LA MONTAGNA. It is an installation consisting of an environmental video shot on the mountain plateaus, and a series of windsocks that signal the invisible movements of the air, creating a new visual reference point for visitors, sensitive to atmospheric changes. The rustle of the windsocks is accompanied by the diffusion of the sound translations of subnuclear wave spectra (in collaboration with the electronic musician Ilaria Lemmo) and by a sound travelogue created for the occasion.

The experiments conducted as part of COSMIC SILENCE, currently underway, aim to deepen the study of the molecular mechanisms involved in the biological response to environmental radiation in model systems, both in vitro and in vivo, at different levels in the phylogenetic scale.

The windsock, a symbolic element connected to weather that has accompanied the artist's research for years, is also a literal signpost of the motorway areas exposed to strong winds in the land route that the artist traveled from Italy to Porto and back. The windsocks installed in Serralves are sewn including fragments of the fluorescent clothing worn by the workers working on the highways. The audio commentary that can be perceived recomposes the sound translation of the radiative spectra of the nuclear physics experiments in the Gran Sasso laboratories (precisely in the neutrino tunnel) with the sounds recorded along the way of a journey by land that followed the need for geographical verification of the world after the months of lockdown: the physical need to point towards an ocean horizon, to reach the Atlantic coast of Portugal without taking a flight for granted.

"While invisible and microscopic elements redefine the rules of movement and the destinies of bodies on the planet, a new audio-visual road signs system accompanies the experience of a space that has been rediscovered or, perhaps, available for the last time." (M.M.)

The four works that form the intervention for The Museum as Performance are the traces of the artist's passage as signs of particle movements. They include the environmental video installation Campo base. Una specie del vento (Base Camp. A kind of wind, sound color 2h 15 '): the start of the climatic and performative monitoring of the project VIP = Violation of the Pauli exclusion principle SOPRA LA MONTAGNA SOTTO LA MONTAGNA; Cosmic Silence 1, MIRA: windsock installed on the tower of the chapel of Serralves Villa; Cosmic Silence 2, fluorescence 1: windsock installed in the access stairwell of the tower accompanied by an ambient audio track (translation of VIP spectra); Cosmic Silence 3, fluorescence 2: windsock installed in the exterior of the “casa do fresco” of Serralves formal gardens, accompanied by an audio diffusion along the interior of the space (audio track built on text and a base of sounds taken from the integral recording of the car journey of the artist back from the Serralves museum to Milan).

The Gran Sasso mountain chain in the centre of Italy is the physical and symbolic centre of the investigation of Margherita Morgantin thanks to its exceptional double perspective.

VIP is a research path that starts from the observation of some images of subnuclear and astroparticle physics in relation to artistic imagination, practiced through personal sensitivity as a form of scientific data. The title borrows the name of one of the particle physics experiments that has been running for years in the Gran Sasso underground laboratories of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare under the Gran Sasso massif. VIP is the acronym that names the experimental search for 'impossible atoms', whose appearance would represent a violation of Pauli exclusion principle, still considered one of the cornerstones of our scientific understanding of the universe and matter. In VIP, the artist's body and experience become part of the scientific tools used for field research.  VIP was articulated is articulated between 2020 and 2021 through different degrees of involvement of various interlocutors and audiences in the processing and presentation of its results.

Production: Xing, 2021

VIP = Violation of the Pauli exclusion principle SOTTO LA MONTAGNA, SOPRA LA MONTAGNAhas been made possible thanks to the support of the Italian Council (VIII edizione 2020).