Second Open Competition for Collide@CERN-Geneva Residency Award announced today

Geneva, 06 December 2012. CERN1 and the City and Canton of Geneva today announce the second open call for entries in the Collide @ CERN-Geneva2 award. This year, the award funded by the City and Canton of Geneva, will be made specifically in film. The competition is open to film makers and screenwriters who work in any area of film making – including documentary, fiction, drama, animation and feature film.

The Collide @ CERN Geneva award celebrates Geneva as an international centre for both the arts and science, and is open to artists who were born, live or work in Geneva. They can apply in open competition to win a funded three-month residency at CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory.

“Films that make a significant impact on audiences are often those that bring hidden aspects and emotions of human existence to the fore,” said CERN Director general Rolf Heuer. “Film is therefore a particularly fascinating domain for the second year of the Collide @ CERN Geneva award, since what we do at CERN is all about working with the invisible.”

“The Canton is particularly happy that the award is to be in film since cinema will be high on its agenda next year, with the 2013 Swiss cinema awards ceremony taking place in Geneva. In offering high-quality cinema courses, we are proud to be helping to make Geneva a great city of cinema. Our collaboration with CERN opens up prospects for exploring the link between fiction and reality, which should be a real source of inspiration to our film-makers”, said Charles Beer, President of the State Council of Geneva in charge of the Department of Education, Culture and Sport.

“Cinema is a mass communication tool that is becoming a hugely effective medium for transferring knowledge and feeding the imagination. Born out of science, cinema derives much inspiration from science to produce fiction,” said Sami Kanaan, Administrative Councillor in charge of the City of Geneva's Department of Culture and Sport. “The Collide @ CERN Geneva residency award offers an original cinematographic experience in the very heart of an organisation that is exploring the area between science and science fiction.”

The purpose of the Collide @ CERN residencies, which were launched by CERN in 2011, is to give talented artists the time and space at CERN for three months to research and develop new ideas about their work and practice by exposing them to the multi-dimensional thinking of particle physics. By the end of the film residency, the film-maker is also expected to have developed a scenario or storyboard.

The residency will take place in 2013, and the artist will be matched with a science inspiration partner for the duration of their residency. The artist and their inspiration partner will participate in a creative blog by which the public can follow the creative process. The artist will also have an office on site at CERN, and they will be expected to create at least two monthly interventions at the laboratory.

At the start and end of the residency period, the artist will also give a joint public lecture with their science inspiration partner at the Globe of Science and Innovation. The residency is funded thanks to the City and Canton of Geneva working in a three-year partnership with CERN. All artists’ insurances are exclusively sponsored by UNIQA SA.

Details of how to apply and the rules are on these websites:

http://www.ville-geneve.ch/themes/culture/soutien-professionnel-culture/prix/prix-collide/
http://www.ge.ch/scc/actu/2011/11/cern-collide.asp

Entries close 11 February 2013.

There will be also the opportunity for artists entering the competition to visit CERN in January two weeks before the deadline. If artists wish to register for this, they must send an email to merce.monje.cano@cern.ch

Press Contacts:

CERN press office, press.office@cern.ch
+41 22 767 34 32
+41 22 767 21 41

Ariane Koek, ariane.koek@cern.ch
Cultural specialist, CERN

Geneviève Bridel 
Chargée d'information et communication 

Service cantonal de la culture - DIP 
République et canton de Genève 


genevieve.bridel@etat.ge.ch 

T +41 22 546 66 68 / +41 79 774 40 48

Veronique Lombard Cheffe de Service
Département de la culture et du sport, Ville de Genève
Veronique.lombard@ville-ge.ch
T+41 22 418 65 55

Further information:

    Collide@CERN website

Footnote(s)

1. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a candidate for accession. Israel and Serbia are Associate Members in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.

2. Collide @ CERN-Geneva is the second strand of the three-year Collide @ CERN Artists Residency programme initiated by CERN in 2011. The Geneva award is jointly funded by the Canton and City of Geneva and is open to artists who were born, live or work in the Geneva area. It is conceived of as a celebration of Geneva's unique role in the creation of CERN in 1952, and highlights Geneva's role in both the arts and science. The award comprises a three-month residency based at the laboratory, with 15,000CHF stipend to the artist and 15,000CHF in development costs.