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The Majorana Experiment comprises three films, a set of photographs and a historical document that constitute an open narrative dispositif.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.