Art & Science

Born in 2019 from a conversation between the Dean's Office of the Faculty of Science of the University of Geneva and the direction of the Haute école d'art et de design de Genève (HEAD), what started as an experiment has grown into an annual tradition. Each edition produces a body of visual work that documents the Faculty's research and reveals the creative voices of HEAD's illustration students.

Alongside the Faculty and HEAD, TheScienceBreaker is the third partner of the project. Each edition opens with a single, intense day. In a few short hours, researchers from across the Faculty's eight disciplines — astronomy, biology, chemistry and biochemistry, computer science, earth and environmental sciences, mathematics, pharmaceutical sciences, and physics — present their work to the illustration students. What makes that day matter is not the lectures themselves, but the conversations they trigger: questions, half-formed analogies, sketches drawn on the spot. From those exchanges, the rest of the edition unfolds. Guided by Clément Paurd and illustrator Sammy Stein, the students are not asked to draw diagrams. They are asked to look at the science and respond — sometimes literally, more often poetically.

Every illustration is published on TheScienceBreaker alongside the popularized summary of the underlying paper, so that image and text reach the public together. From there the work travels: into press releases, onto the Faculty's Instagram, into exhibitions. For many of the students, it is the first time their work is seen beyond the studio walls.

What stays constant, edition after edition, is something subtler than the images themselves — a way of looking at scientific research through someone else's eyes. Not to simplify it, but to open it.