Carlo Rovelli at the Cornelia Parker exhibition at Tate Britain
David Stock
Carlo Rovelli standing in front of an exploding hut. Wall fragments and shattered contents (part of a child’s tricycle, a record player, shredded Wellington boots) hang in the air behind him. The Tate in London He came to meet the physicist and best-selling author at an exhibition held at the British Art Gallery. Scattered Objects is the work of Cornelia Parker, one of Britain’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, known for her large-scale installations that reconstruct everyday objects.
For Roveri, who is based at Aix-Marseille University in France, Parker’s research is meaningful because it reflects his take on the nature of reality. “I’m connected to the process: her coming up with ideas, generating ideas, telling us about those ideas, and we responding to them,” he says. “We can’t understand Cornelia Parker’s work by looking at it, and we can’t understand reality by looking at things.”
Rovelli is the proponent of an idea known as relational quantum mechanics, the conclusion of which is that objects do not exist independently of each other.It’s a concept that doesn’t easily catch on, so Parker’s reality-challenging exhibition seemed to be a useful setting for a conversation about that and what else Roveri was up to. It is a happy coincidence that the hut of cold dark matter, a reference to the unidentified things that are believed to make up most of the universe. Because Loveli thinks we know how to finally pin…
