El botijo Cuántico is an artistic project born from the convergence of three complementary languages: ceramics, photography, and visual simulation.

The original idea emerged from the Málaga-based ceramist Concha Cuadra, whose artistic research found a decisive turning point following her visit to CERN in December 2024. During those days, direct contact with research environments, conversations with scientists, and the experience of walking through the facilities triggered a profound transformation in her creative process. The scale of the infrastructure, the precision of the technology, and the conceptual depth of the experiments reshaped her understanding of matter: clay ceased to be merely a traditional material and became instead a metaphor for energy, collision, vacuum, and invisible structure.

From this experience, ceramics evolved into a symbolic territory where concepts from contemporary physics take material form, establishing a dialogue between tradition, science, and artistic creation.
The choice of the traditional Spanish botijo is intentional: an ancestral vessel that cools water through evaporation, it embodies a subtle understanding of physical laws within everyday culture. By reinterpreting this humble form to address quantum physics and cosmology, the project connects vernacular material tradition with the most fundamental scientific questions.

The perspective of Burgos-born photographer Santiago Martínez de Septién explores these pieces through light and detail, expanding their meaning through a distinctive visual narrative that reveals textures, tensions, and silences imperceptible at first glance.

This dialogue is further extended by mathematician and computational scientist Jürgen Döllner, whose algorithmic simulations introduce the language of calculation and digital visualization as a new form of matter, broadening the work into the computational realm.

Engineers and mathematicians by training, artists by vocation, the three authors construct a shared reflection on the origin of the universe and the search for universal laws that seek to explain it, integrating tradition, technology, and scientific thought into a unified aesthetic experience.

Today, El botijo Cuántico is presented here at CERN, within a context where fundamental questions about matter, space, and time form part of daily work. The exhibition integrates into this environment as an artistic proposal that does not aim to illustrate science, but to engage in dialogue with it through intuition, metaphor, and form.

Following its presentation at the Universidad de Málaga, the project reaches a new dimension here: situating itself within the very intellectual ecosystem that inspired it, strengthening the connection between art, scientific thought, and the great questions of the universe.