Loop Quantum Gravity Cave

The Loop Quantum Gravity Cave Archive is an expansive, nomadic project that functions as a bridge between the vanguard of theoretical physics and the primal roots of human expression. Initiated in 2010 at the Faculté des Sciences de Luminy in Marseille—home to the research team led by physicist Carlo Rovelli—the “Cave” has since migrated through the world’s most prestigious scientific sanctuaries, including the Albert Einstein Institute in Berlin, the C.I.S.C. in Madrid, and the Perimeter Institute in Canada.

At its core, the work utilizes a contemporary “primitive” technology: Pozzi maps the hands of the world’s leading researchers—including figures such as Abhay Ashtekar, Hermann Nicolai, and Carlo Rovelli—using a UV LED lamp on a phosphorus-treated tablet. This process creates a series of Light Drawings that serve as a modern digital cave painting, a language that Pozzi identifies as the ancestral substratum of every creative and cognitive process.

From an interdisciplinary perspective, the archive mimics the very subject of the scientists’ research: the emergence of space-time in Quantum Gravity. By recording the physical presence of the researchers’ hands, the work transforms a community of specialized thinkers into an entangled network. Each handprint is a “state of superposition”—a potentiality of knowledge—that becomes a classical, visible record only through the artist’s intervention.

This collection of luminous gestures acts as a “probabilistic archive,” where the names of the participants represent distinct parallel universes of thought. As these individual “histories” are gathered into a single installation, they trigger a process of decoherence, allowing a collective, non-linear map of human consciousness to emerge.

Participants:

Abhay Ashtekar / Daniele Oriti / Isabeau Prémont-Schwarz / Etera R. Livine / Francesca Vidotto / Hermann Nicolai / Fotini Markopoulou / Jean-Luc Lehners / Carlos Guedes / Frank Hellmann / Luis J. Garay / Grigory Vartanov / Guillermo A. Mena-Marugan / Jerzy Lewandowski / Bianca Dittrich / Laurent Freidel / Lorenzo Sindoni /Alejandro Perez / Wolfgang Wieland / Raymond Aschheim / Oscar Varela / Daniel Martín De Blas / Muxin Han / Carlo Rovelli / Javier Olmedo Nieto / Simone Speziale / Stefan Theisen / Matteo Smerlak / Ajay Singh / Benjamin Assel / Jaume Gomis / Jorge G. Russo / Valentin Bonzom / Aurélien Barrau and others.