• TOMÁS SARACENO
  • For more than two decades Tomás Saraceno has explored the future of our planet, through floating sculptures, interactive installations that merge art, architecture and science, community projects and experiments with solar-powered human flights.
     
    Exploring the possibility of an airborne existence as part of his ongoing Air-Port-City / Cloud City project – a utopia of flying metropolises made up of habitable, cell-like platforms that migrate and recombine as freely as clouds themselves. Building on the progressive proposals and theories put forth by R. Buckminster Fuller, Gyula Kosice, Yona Friedman and other visionary architects before him, Saraceno develops engaging proposals and models that invite viewers to conceptualize innovative ways of living and interacting with one another, and with their surroundings at large.
  • In a moment of environmental crisis, defined by rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and the accelerated extinction of a growing number of species, especially invertebrates, these ideas are even more important. Clouds are disappearing, replaced by new clouds of toxic pollution particulates: ash, black carbon, organochlorine pesticides, sulfur dioxide—particles that populate what once was simply wind and rain, throwing into question the very fibre of our world. 
     
    Every change within the web of life is refracted in this fragile tension, calling for new ways of thinking, feeling and knowing multiple atmospheric threads of interconnection. 
  • Aeolus 1.54 stems from Saraceno’s long-standing artistic inquiry Cloud Cities, a proposal for a new, alternative form of urbanism, a venture for airborne habitats. The cluster-like artwork is composed of a number of interconnected modules constructed with mirrored hand-blown glass, a material that, like clouds, exists at the intersection of air, water, and earth. Distant matter floats through the atmosphere, assembling to form an alighted cloud. These irregular structures, reminiscent of a geometric Weaire-Phelan structure of foam and soap bubbles, act as an invitation to engage from diverse bearings, where there is neither up nor down, no inside or outside, and all is floating. 
     
    The reflective surfaces of the panels illuminate an aqueous world of gold and silver, where boundaries become fluid and human spatial coordinates are challenged. What alternative ways of being emerge through a momentary immersion in this floating, aqueous world of light? Clouds perform as vital interlocutors between Earth, Atmosphere, and Sun, their various morphologies carry with them messages of weather-presents and futures, guiding the fulfilment of our basic needs and shaping the spheres of our social, mental and environmental ecologies. In reflection, reality is revealed: the participant is inextricable from the surrounding environment in both cause and effect, melted, molded and sculpted, affected and affecting the viscous entanglement of the seen and unseen. 

  • How might we float differently, re-examining freedom of movement whilst preserving earthly cloudscapes across planetary boundaries?
  • Everything stands in relation to everything else. In Ancient Greek, pneuma means both breath and spirit. Breath is life—to live in the air, then, is not a distant dream or thought-experiment, but a logical conclusion. We are produced by the air, fed by the air; we live, in the words of Evangelista Torricelli, at the bottom of an ocean of air.
     
    Pneuma 28.94 is an illustration of symbiosis in nature, as well as a reminder of the permeability of scale. Glass spheres bound together by a web of cord resemble magnificent cloud-like formations, perhaps a floating city, a Cloud City –one whose size and shape is never fixed and which displaces our conventional notions of boundaries and territories. 
     

    Each sphere contains biotic multitudes, populating the air inside. Like our aquatic oceans, the aerial ocean is home to myriad entities both living and nonliving—just one cubic inch of air holds 25 billion molecules! These include (among others) dust particles—both cosmic and terrestrial in origin—from the formation of galaxies, the sloughing of skin cells, the emission of billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere; cyanobacteria, the organisms which first released oxygen into the Earth’s air 2.4 billion years ago; and airborne spores, including pollen, whose resilience and mobility help ensure survival for their species. The biotic multitudes inhabiting Pneuma 28.94 coalesce with Tillandsias, resilient aerial plants without roots that grow wherever conditions allow and get their water and nutrients from the ocean of air, remind us that the terrestrial and the celestial are one, an entangled world where solidarity is a prerequisite for survival.

  • Saraceno's interest in the interconnectivity of living and non living beings developed into a profound exploration into spiders and their webs. Formed of complex interwoven networks suspended in air, the artist brings different species of spiders together to create complex architectures. As these spiders weave in the same space, bridging the sculptures of each other’s webs, each one of them tells a story of hybrid relationships, entangling not only different arachnid webbed ecosystems, but also human and more-than-human worlds.

  • Spiders spin tiny Universes. Formed of complex interwoven networks suspended in air, the Hybrid Websunique architectures originate from inter-specific encounters between unrelated solitary, social and semi-social spider species. As different spiders from different species weave in the same space, bridging the architectures of each other’s webs, each one of them tells a story of hybrid relationships, entangling not only different arachnid webbed ecosystems, but also human and more-than-human worlds. In this series, floating galaxies made of different silk and web types collide, challenging gravity and fostering the emergence of new kinds of vibrational environments. There, sensory worlds and lines of communication merge and connect, the web being considered an extension of the spider’s sensorial and cognitive systems.
     
    The works’ titles feature the names, genus and species of the spider collaborators who came together to tune their strings, and the amount of time needed to shape and compose their three-dimensional webs.

  • “Spiders, we now understand, have given us a model of which the present is a simulacrum, though not just the technocratic, seemingly intangible future-present of life online but also the real-world urgency of environmental relationships and their fragility.”
     
    (David Toop, Filament Drums: the Endless Instrument, in Cosmic Jive: The Spider Sessions, 2014)
  • “It is in that golden stain of time that we are to look for the real light” —John Ruskin, The... “It is in that golden stain of time that we are to look for the real light” —John Ruskin, The... “It is in that golden stain of time that we are to look for the real light” —John Ruskin, The...

    “It is in that golden stain of time that we are to look for the real light” 

    —John Ruskin, The Lamp of Memory (1849).

     

    All the gold that has ever existed is an alchemical gift from the cosmos, born in the fiery echoes of the collision of two neutron stars billions of years ago. This stellar explosion formed a rift in the fabric of the universe: a black hole through which rare and heavy elements escaped. A cosmic transmutation event that dusted the universe with gold. 

     

    At the time of this first explosion, the Earth had not yet assumed its form. The universe was a spongy network of light and dark matter, galaxies and gases clustering into filaments like beads of water forming along invisible silken threads. The superstructure of the universe emerging as a complex, three-dimensional cosmic (spider/)web.  

     

    Gold spider/web maps figure the analogy between spider and cosmic web. Just as the spider/web is a material record of the spider’s movements through space and time, the gold spider/web map draws a speculative diagram of the celestial paths along which gold was scattered; tracing the early metallic vertebrae of nascent and burgeoning planetary forms. A tentative cartography of cosmic alchemy.

     

    Spider/webs are not only a record of trajectories past, but a living archive of dust—terrestrial and cosmic—that clings to its charged silken threads. Gold spider/web maps imagine the typologies of particulate matter which bathed the universe in the afterglow of that germinal stellar explosion. Patinas of gold dust rendering visible patterns of emergence through time and space, both animal and astronomical. 

     

    In turn, golden spider/web maps ask the question: what is the metabolic consequence for the spider of this early cosmic dispersal of gold dust? Spiders often supplement their diet with pollen and other particulate matter that clings to their webs, elements of which are then expressed in the silk that the spider releases from her spinnerets. These artworks speculate about the origin stories of the golden spider/webs woven by the Nephila spider—stained by carotenoid pigments which gift her silk an iridescent golden hue, and which scatter light in a spectral reflectance pattern specific to the bees she wishes to lure into her web. Through the digestion of gold dust caught in its web, how has the spider transmuted this cosmic alchemical gift into new silken architectures? Is this where the correspondence between the spider and cosmic web was born?

  • Composed of habitat-like geometries reminiscent of Saraceno’s Cloud Cities, Cirrus Uncinus Clouds/M+I reveals the elemental properties that, through the very essence of our lives, seem to perpetually recede from view. Irregular forms evocative of a Weaire-Phelan structure of foam and soap bubbles act as an invitation to engage from diverse bearings, as iridescent planes reflect and translate the sun’s rays in a play of light and modulating hues. The web-like structures set within the sculpture resonate with the woven habitats of spiders and the cosmic web. 

     

  • RAY 10.26 is the result of cross-disciplinary research driven by artistic curiosity into the realm of light. Suspended between two orbital arcs held together in mutual tension, rests a mirrored sphere. As rays of light reflect on it, a novel perspective of the inhabited world is revealed. By attuning to this play with illumination, observers can become active participants, moving around the sphere and inviting different elements into the reflective dialogue. In this way, the rays of light, constantly evading the senses, are brought out of metaphorical obscurity to propose ways of observation that are sensitive to the surrounding environment.

  • Zonal Harmonic N 100/10 is composed of orbits held together through mutual tension. Configurations float in space; arcs seem to bend, recompose and come together like molecular helical structures; inside, the strands entangle tiny universes.

     

    Finding inspiration from multiverse epistemological tensions, the sculpture possesses intricate layers, defining its spatiality and shape. These are intersected with thin filaments that together form a tensegrity model and set forth the delicate composition. Bowed components and linear connections embody the tensions and power balance that together form crescents and spherical orbs. These, in return, lend the conceptual reference to the name of each artwork: zonal harmonics are sets of functions that are invariant under a rotation around fixed axes. The physical dynamics that the artwork conveys extend from microscopic particles to planetary gravitational forces. 

  • Overtime, Saraceno’s research grew into the international, interdisciplinary artistic community Aerocene, which seeks to create an environment free from borders, free from fossil fuels. As part of this community in 2015, Saraceno achieved the world record for the first and longest certified fully-solar manned flight and in 2020, Saraceno, together with the Aerocene community, launched the most sustainable human flight in the history of aviation, certified by the FAI (Fédération Aéronautique Internationale).
  • This photograph captures the flight of Aerocene Pacha on January 28, 2020 on a voyage flying free, lifted only by...

    This photograph captures the flight of Aerocene Pacha on January 28, 2020 on a voyage flying free, lifted only by the sun and the air, without lithium, solar panels, helium or fossil fuels. In Salinas Grandes, Argentina, utilizing lighter-than-air technology, Fly with Aerocene Pacha saw a ground-breaking aerosolar balloon attune to the weather and atmospheric conditions, lifting a human into aerosolar movement, only with the power of the sun. This marked the most sustainable human flight in the history of aviation, being certified by the FAI (Fédération Aéronautique Internationale). This event included representatives of the Salinas Grandes’ native communities, bringing attention to their fight to reduce lithium extraction in the region and the environmental issues it causes the surrounding communities.

     

     

    Proceeds from the sale of the related artworks coming out of this historic event will support the 33 communities of Salinas Grandes, Jujuy, Argentina, resisting environmental injustice.

  • Born in 1973 in Tucuman, Argentina, Saraceno currently lives and works in Berlin. He studied architecture at Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires in Argentina from 1992 to 1999 and received postgraduate degrees from Escuela Superior de bellas Ares de la Nación Ernesto de la Carcova, Buenos Aires (2000) and Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste - Städelschule-Frankfurt am Main (2003). In 2009, he attended the International Space Studies Program at NASA Center Ames in Silicon Valley, CA, and was awarded the prestigious Calder Prize later that year.
     
    In February 2022, Tomas Saraceno will have a major solo exhibition at The Shed, New York.