Systems of a Down (d), 2015

Born from a decade-long engagement with the photographic archives of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), this project operates as a rigorous topographic survey of the material debris of high-energy physics: the failed experiments, fractured components, and obsolete instruments originally engineered for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Within the framework of Quantum Chromodynamics, the fundamental constituents of matter are, by their very nature, inaccessible. As physicist João Seixas observes, quarks are inextricably bound within hadrons—held in a kind of opaque, “white” confinement that effectively withdraws them from the observable world. The vast apparatus of CERN exists precisely to breach this condition: to act as a transparent conduit, engineering the means by which the invisible might be made visible.

The objects catalogued in this series, however, occupy a profound ontological paradox. Designed to reveal the unseen, they have entered the archive—and thus become visible as objects in their own right—only because they failed. Stripped of their scientific function, they can no longer serve as windows onto the quantum realm. Instead, failure arrests them in the material world, transforming them into stubborn, irreducibly opaque, yet beautiful artifacts: cracked housings, calibration remnants, dormant lenses stilled mid-task, etc..

It is precisely this quality of arrested materiality—the object caught at the threshold between instrument and ruin—that locates the work within a specific photographic tradition. The series positions itself as a contemporary, quantum-age iteration of Walker Evans’s 1955 photo essay Beauties of the Common Tool. Where Evans isolated familiar hardware—wrenches, pliers, shears—against spare backgrounds to reveal the latent dignity of utility, this project isolates hyper-specialized components stripped of all recognizable purpose. Rather than celebrating the everyday, it assembles a modernist taxonomy of the esoteric: objects whose function was never legible to the layperson, and whose failure has made it permanently so. What remains is a question the objects cannot answer: whether beauty is something that accrues to a thing, or something that is finally revealed when everything else — purpose, function, success — has been stripped away. What is left is matter in its most candid state: no longer reaching, no longer useful, no longer transparent to anything beyond itself — and, in that stillness, unexpectedly present.