The Higgs Particle

Performance lecture with 6 slide projectors 6 screens and 160 slides,  in Stedelijk Museum Schiedam

New version at Art Centre De Kolk Spaarndam 2021

The Higgs Particle is a lecture performance in which the audience is placed inside an “analog particle accelerator” — a space where slides appear and disappear all around them. Roos van Geffen walks in circles among the spectators, weaving together the scientific quest for the Higgs particle with personal stories and philosophical questions. During and after her storytelling, projections of fleeting circles emerge and dissolve around the audience, echoing the way particles appear and decay inside CERN’s particle accelerator.

Roos van Geffen:
“For years I have been fascinated by the Higgs particle — a subatomic particle that gives other particles mass. It is an invisible force that holds matter together. After decades of searching, the Higgs was finally discovered in CERN’s 27-kilometer-long particle accelerator. If such a force can be found on a subatomic level, might it also exist within us? What makes us present, or absent?

With this question in mind, I walked circular routes of 27 kilometers on Terschelling, in Amsterdam, Spain, and Greece. I also hiked in Scotland’s Cairngorm Mountains — the very place where Peter Higgs conceived his groundbreaking idea in 1964. Instead of finding answers, I encountered circles everywhere: temporary circles in the landscape. A flock of birds flying in a perfect ring, a tree mirrored in water so that together with its shadow it forms a flawless circle.”

Excerpt from the performance lecture:

“In physics there is no objectivity.
We cannot subtract ourselves.
We are part of nature.
So when you study nature, you are studying yourself.
In essence, physics is the study of the structure of consciousness. (…)

I approach the summit of the Cairngorm, the blue mountain.
I feel drops on my cheeks, rain on my lashes.
My eye, my consciousness, as a binding force.
The searching eye scans the landscape for the infinite temporary circle as an answer.
Higgs saw what I saw. Clouds drift low, mist clings to the mountainside — for a moment a cloud circle appears: empty space encircled by hydrogen particles.”

In 2021 the publication The Higgs Particle was published, a leporello of 220cm in signed edition of 50, with the text of the performance lecture in Dutch, and photos from the series.

Order for 35€ bij sending an email.