WAY BEYOND

The Future Circular Collider is the gateway to unraveling the mysteries of our universe’s origins. With this revolutionary machine, we will finally have the capability to peer back in time to the very beginning. This journey, straddling the realms of metaphysics and underground engineering, tells the story of humanity's relentless pursuit of knowledge and the monumental efforts made to achieve it.

A schematic map showing a possible location for the Future Circular Collider (Image: ©CERN)

"At CERN, an international commission of experts closely follows the FCC (Future Circular Collider) dossier, an enormous project to construct the new particle accelerator, the result of a collaboration between more than 150 institutions and partners. Pauline Julier’s film is presented like a multi-faceted mirror of this mad and beautiful adventure, with its unexpected ramifications, connecting scientific research to the most diverse questions, and thus touching on the communication strategy, territorial policy, or even financing… Although science inspires dreams, if it is to turn public and political opinion in its favour, it must know how to sell itself. Through brilliant writing, Way Beyond retraces the story of this colossal challenge, charmingly evoking an entire imaginary scientific world. While the archive images and the elegant and carefully prepared soundtrack send us back to a form of retro-futurism, the discussions between the experts gathered are feeling trivial, overly pragmatic and down-to-earth, so far away from the origin of the universe and fundamental particles." Javier Martín

Pauline Julier is an artist and filmmaker. She explores the links that humans create with their environment through stories, rituals, knowledge and images. Her films and installations are composed of elements of diverse origins (documentary, theoretical, fictional) to restitute the complexity of our relationship to the world.

Pauline Julier (Image: Instagram @julierpauline ©RaphaelleMueller)

Her installations and films have been screened in contemporary art centers, institutions and festivals around the world, including the Center Pompidou (Paris), Loop (Barcelona), Visions du Réel (Nyon), Tokyo Wonder Site (Tokyo), Museum of Modern Art in Tanzania, Geneva Art Center, Palazzo Grassi (Venice), New York, Madrid, Berlin, Zagreb, Cinémathèque de Toronto and the Pera Museum in Istanbul. Julier had a solo exhibition at the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris (CCS) in 2017. She completed a year-long residency in Rome in 2020 at the Istituto Svizzero, and her film Naturales Historiae has been shown online on Vdrome.org. Her film "Way Beyond", premiered in competition at Visions du Reel Festival and has been in theatres in Switzerland in fall 2022. She received the Swiss Art Award 2021 in Basel and had a big installation in the Insitute of Contemporary Art in Villeurbanne (FR- february 2022). MEADOW, one of her latest artist book has just been published by Roma Publications Amsterdam. Two new books And so on, A Single Universe and Inscribing Images on the Collective Retina will soon be published by Scheidegger & Spiess. Her institutional solo show ‘A Single Universe’ at Aargauer Kunsthaus (CH) is on view until October 2024.

Host or Publisher University of Liverpool