Primer Cero

Where does the origin of the universe and ours intersect?

Primer Cero

A transdisciplinary piece that integrates dance, science and technology and invites us to reflect on the conception of our Origin.

Primer Cero refers to the primordial 'nothing' where the Whole inexplicably arose. It is an allegory to the singularity, from where the Big Bang postulates the universe was born. Peculiarity that is spoken of with the imagination, because reason has not been able to cover it completely. Any mathematical tool that has tried to tackle it has deconstructed itself into divisions by zero; divergences to infinity and all kinds of indeterminate results. An asymptotic nature enables one to be at the cutting edge without being directly defined. At this point mathematics gives way to poetry.

Primer Cero is the result of a research process that began in the facilities of the European Center for Nuclear Research CERN in Switzerland in September 2019. It was produced with the support of Art@CMS at CERN, the Ministry of Culture of Colombia and the Santa Maria workshop center in France and led to the artwork called Primer Cero.

Primer Cero is an install-action, a term with which in Ymoov we refer to an installation that has been designed to contain and function from a scenic act.

It consists of a transdisciplinary Open Source that integrates dance, science and technology which invites us to reflect on the conception of our Origin to confront the different perceptions that humanity has reached in its search for Reality and to question established positions to enable dialogue with new approaches.

Primer Cero argues against a social structure that has stopped emphasizing questions that are supposed to be solved: Where do we come from? Who are we? Why are we here?... Going deeper into such essential issues could be the way to a free reflection outside of established doctrines.

Primer Cero conceives the body as the primordial unit of all interpretation and experimentation of the universe, together with dance, they manage to be an instrument of observation. Dance has been part of the history of humanity, manifesting itself as the artistic expression that uses the body to communicate, in general, a universal language that maintains a permanent interaction with reality, seen from the context where all body sensations and perception.

Locker room "1er0-Mirror Dermis"

We consider the first zero costumes, as an art piece in itself, inspired by the work «Wandering the immeasurable» by the artist Gayle Hermick, a sculpture that stands in Galileo Galilei Square in front of the Globe of Science and Innovation at the CERN facility in Geneva.

It is an allegory of how the metaphors and analogies that we use to interpret the universe (including mathematics) contain the immeasurable, despite existing only in our imagination; like the apparent enormous depth that lies in the dermis of a mirror that reflects a starry sky.

We follow the path of Gayle Hermick, which covers in his sculpture the main discoveries of physics throughout history and we redirect it to allude to the multiple paths we have taken in the history of humanity, when looking for an explanation of our origin; also including various ancestral Colombian cosmogonies and different parts of the world, of concepts that have been parallel, have evolved and are still preserved in our current visions.

An Open Source work

Primer Cero it is Open Source, all developments of the piece are released under a license Creative Commons, which allows any user to partially or totally reproduce, use and/or modify each component that constitutes the work. This way you can use all the choreographies, designs, visual content, music and sounds, plans, software with source code and conceptualization, among others. All these characteristics open up a wide range of possibilities when thinking about possible scenarios and contexts for the work.

We consider the character Open Source from Primer Cero as an important part of its conceptualization. For Ymoov disclosure should be an inseparable companion of creation and knowledge. We will release this work, with each concept, reflection and reference that composes it, so that it can be understood, adopted, reproduced and even improved by whoever so wishes. The aim is to encourage the task of demystifying art and give anyone the opportunity to test themselves in fair and honest conditions, without being marginalized beforehand by a veil of mystery that sometimes only serves to elevate empty ideas to the realm of the scholarly incomprehensible.

Resources will be accessible through our online repository. Currently the said repository is giving its first and in constant development, however it is already accessible from here.

Residence at CERN

This project was born in response to the invitation we received, Margaret Arias and Adrian Serna, creative directors of Ymoov, to carry out an artistic residence in the facilities of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. The residency took place during two weeks inside the laboratories, accompanied by a group of scientific mentors and artists, a fundamental part of the conceptual development of our project.

This residency required us to create a preliminary idea of an art piece in which our disciplines as artists would introduce a relationship with particle physics or some of the research being carried out at CERN, as an element of inspiration. This is how starting from the dance and technology binomial, pillars of the birth of Ymoov, we undertook our search addressing the studies about the Origin and its conception.

This residency was carried out thanks to the program Suratomic, with the support of @artcms, from September 19 to October 3, 2019 and supported by the Ministry of Culture of Colombia with one of its International Circulation Scholarships⁴ from the 2019 stimulus program.

With the residence already executed at the CERN, we had enough information and key contacts, to finish the conceptual integration together with the general script of the piece. This allowed us to be part of the artistic residence program of the Santa Maria workshop center in Heleta – France, where in 6 weeks the pre-production process of the project was developed and the different factors that made it possible to carry out the work were defined.