A starting point for BEELZEBUB’S BUFFER BED is a 1932 parody of Goethe’s Faust, performed by physicists at a conference at the Niels Bohr Institute. In the parody, figures from the drama are recast as physicists, and its concerns become questions of physics. Lea Porsager found a copy of the script in CERN’s Wolfgang Pauli Archive during her residency there.

In Goethe’s drama, Mephistopheles promises Faust greater knowledge, experience and possibility, while Faust wagers that he will forfeit his soul if he ever finds an experience so satisfying that he wishes the moment to last. Porsager relates Faust’s inability to arrive at “enough” to a contemporary condition of acceleration and the continual pursuit of more.

BEELZEBUB’S BUFFER BED approaches the devil figure through the intimate form of a bed. Beds recur in Porsager’s practice as places associated with intimacy, transformation and altered states of consciousness. Described as a “rubber baton-bed”, this one is constructed from rubber fenders and aluminium. The rubber’s capacity to absorb impact gives the bed a peculiar tension: it invites contact while cushioning against it.