Majorana Eigenstates

The Majorana Experiment comprises three films, a set of photographs and a historical document that constitute an open narrative dispositif. The story unfolds from an account of Ettore Majorana, a genius of Italian physics who disappeared at sea in 1938 under mysterious circumstances.

In the main film, Majorana Eigenstates, an actor who interprets Majorana – and who strangely resembles him – synchronically lives in two places: a hotel room in Naples, where the real Ettore Majorana lived before vanishing at sea, and the cabin of a ship. The use of two cameras with a parallax gap generates a split filmic space.

The theory advanced in this work is speculative. Majorana operated a "quantum disappearance" on himself: a passage from an embodied existence to a multiplication of "eigenstates", which can synchronically co-exist in different places, transcending the laws that link time and space. This idea endows classical narrative with an open structure, in which Majorana's uncertain journey becomes a time capsule, a container for narratives that subsequent historicizations can potentially bestow with meaning.