The exhibition itinerary of Nothing is Lost. Art and Matter in Transformation is completed by an environmental installation by the Swedish artist Nina Canell for the GAMeC’s Spazio Zero, aimed at investigating the boundary between living and inert materialities.

The project is part of the Meru Art*Science Research Program, born from the collaboration between GAMeC, the Foundation Meru/ Medolago Ruggeri for biomedical research and BergamoScienza, already promoters, between 2013 and 2017, of the prestigious Meru Art*Science Award, aimed at promoting art projects linked to the development of scientific research.

This is how the artist describes the project in an excerpt of an interview published in the exhibition catalogue (GAMeC Books, 2021):

“Our built environment is an acceleration of material stress that is difficult to grasp. My intention with covering the gallery floor with seashells in its original recognisable form is to tap into that incomprehensibility. [..] Material and duration literally condense under our feet, and in doing so, momentarily connects our bodies with deep geological time in a single haptic crunch. There is something both tender and brutal in the act of walking and trampling into the seashells, yet, materially speaking, the difference between walking on calcium carbonate invertebrates or a concrete gallery floor is very slight. We know that the crushing and shuffling of lime and silica caused by humans could be scaled up into incomprehensible numbers. Around half a trillion metric tonnes of concrete have so far been cast for human use, enough to spread a kilogram layer across every square metre of the earth’s surface, half of it produced in the last 20 years. The industrial approach to mineral processing produces a view to material as mechanistic and passive. I want to detach materiality from the realm of indifference by making a bodily connection; from bones to bones. A sounding fracture reminding us of the ineffable amount of bodies and relations that hold us up.”