Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Web(s) of Life, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2023 Tomás Saraceno in Collaboration - Web(s) of Life, which will run from 1 June to 10 September 2023 at the
Serpentine Galleries and Royal Parks in London, is the first major UK exhibition of Saraceno and collaborators. In collaboration with the interspecies communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc, Argentina, Somié, Cameroon, Aerocene, Arachnophilia, and the Royal Parks, Web(s) of Life will examine the entanglement of life forms, extractive technologies and energy regimes within the context of the climate emergency. In our increasingly digitised era, Web(s) of Life encourages visitors to engage with the practice of noticing bioindicators: organisms that can signal various climatic and ecological shifts. The show, as Christina Petridou notes, "invites spectators to reflect on the significant impacts of local actions, digital memory, and consumer capitalism". Speaking of the ethos embedded into the exhibition, Saraceno asks: "In the context of the environmental crisis and the need for a just, eco-social, energy transition, can techno-diversity and biodiversity interact differently? Can systems of power move beyond the inequalities of capitalism and the reproduction of neocolonial extractivism of minerals and data? Can the privilege of digital memories over ancestral memories be overcome? Enter the spider's dream, a space with codes of another ritual… It is high time some of us change our habits and not the climate!". In Web(s) of Life, the infrastructure of the Serpentine's buildings will be altered to consider animals, plants and humans of all ages: with temperature and humidity controls deactivated, spiders will be present, spinning their webbed pavilions throughout the exhibition space. Alongside the immersive experience of web installations, participants can log on nggamdu.org, a web portal for an ancient ritual of spider divination Saraceno developed for local diviner Bollo Pierre Tadios with Arachnophilia in collaboration with the anthropologist David Zeitlyn. The exhibition will also feature an immersive filmic installation, celebrating the extensive collaboration between Aerocene and other environmental collectives. Within the Royal Parks, the site's rich diversity of birds, insects, plants and other species will be engaged with via interactive sculptures. Speaking to Saraceno's ongoing arachnology projects, namely Arachnophilia, the exhibition will serve as a further exploration and celebration of the intricate architectural wonders created by the spiders. Always in motion, the exhibition will incorporate public programming, inviting viewers to (re)consider the effects of our actions both visible and invisible, (re)centering our attention towards sustainable futures.
Oceans of Air, Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, Australia, 2022 Oceans of Air, Saraceno's 2022 solo show at the
Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, features ethereal aerosolar sculptures, samples of invisible particle pollution collected from Mumbai's skies, radio waves beamed from First Nations Argentina, along with dust particles from the museum and across Australia. This exhibition also features works which demonstrate Saraceno's ongoing arachnology project, Arachnophilia. Within the gallery space of MONA, Saraceno installed a series of interlacing webs which act as living structures, charting how as spiders move through space, they leave behind 'a material memory and diagram of the spider's drift through the air'. Mona curator Emma Pike notes how "Tomás is a collector of perspectives, looking at the world through many eyes… he is as invested in the conversations which form the foundation of his works as he is in their astonishing outcomes. As a recovering arachnophobe, I have Tomás's gentle and beautiful interspecies collaborations to thank for reminding me of my own connectedness, from pollution particles to sound waves to the cosmos." Oceans of Air also features new, site-specific work commissioned for the gallery: herbarium diptych works, created from plant specimens gathered from Hobart, notably
cultural burning locations and places affected by bushfires and hazard-reduction efforts. Also featured in Oceans of Air is
We do not all breathe the same air (2018–ongoing), a piece created using a Beta Attenuation Mass Monitor (BAM). Hourly pushing air through a glass fiber strip, the machine produces lines of dots on to paper, dots whose colors vary depending on quantity and type of particles floating in the air at each given moment. The work encapsulates one of the key themes of Saraceno's work: making the invisible, visible.
Particular Matter(s), The Shed, New York, 2022 Particular Matter(s) at
The Shed, New York, is Tomás Saraceno's largest solo show in the US to date, featuring interactive installations and levitating sculptures that center on Saraceno's artistic and philosophical focus on human and non-human collaboration, planetary cohabitation and mutual interdependence. The show begins with
Webs of At-tent(s)-ion (2018), with visitors stepping through a blackout curtain into almost complete darkness; the first moment in which the show requires radical visual adjustment from the visitors, or as Sarah-Rose Hansen puts it, "'dark adaptation', a scientific term used to refer to the physiological process of pupil dilation and rod activation that allows the human eye to see at night." As visitors adjust to their new photic settings, they are confronted with seven spot-lit spiderwebs encased in glass display cases. Orchestrating a contemplative ambience, visitors move semi-visibly between the sculptures, pausing to reflect on the wall texts which articulate the exhibition's overarching theme: the need for collaboration and cohabitation of humans and nonhumans alike within the entangled Capitalocene era in which we find ourselves. As the gallery voices in their description, "blurring the boundaries between inside and outside,
Webs of At-tent(s)ion is an invitation to attune ourselves to collaboratively imagined futures, grounded in principles of collective care and hope as practiced and maintained by certain communities all over the world, and to the radical interconnectedness of all beings with whom we share this "damaged planet," both living and nonliving.". In the second gallery, visitors meet the exhibition's eponymous work,
Particular Matter(s)(2020), consisting of a beam of light that illuminates the "
cosmic dust" floating in the gallery's atmosphere. Aimed at the entrance, the beam forces the viewers to undergo a rapid dark to light adaptation, before transitioning back into the darkness that fills the remainder of the room. Akin to
Webs of At-tent(s)-ion (2018), the darkness seeks to create a space that, without steering towards somberness, allows for tender reflection in which viewers can meditate on deeper philosophical questions around ecology and the climate emergency. Following into the next room, the exhibition's nocturnal atmosphere persists with Saraceno's Shed commission,
We Do Not All Breathe the Same Air (2019–2022), which deals with the socio-political questions of climate inequality embedded within scientific studies of air pollution. This piece sits alongside
Arachnomancy Cards (2018–2022), Saraceno's accompanying card deck for his Arachnomancy App, centered on invertebrate rights and Arachnophilia. The exhibition also features
Sounding the Air (2020) and
How to entangle the universe in a spider/web, before viewers gravitate towards the faint lighting surrounding and reflected from Saraceno's large silver spheres which make up
A Thermodynamic imaginary (2020). In this work, viewers are invited to meditate on the ecological interconnectivity running throughout our universe. As The Shed notes, "in the dispersal of light, visitors confuse their shadows with their neighbors' as gestures overlap, mirror, and intersect in a black-and-white scenography. Bodies and sculptures merge with the other entities in the room, be they human or non-human, organic or constructed." Continuing with the exhibition's photic transition, light takes center stage in
Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web (2022). Commissioned by
The Shed specifically for this show, the piece consists of a spider/web concert and multisensory performance inside the McCourt. Spanning 39 meters in diameter, a huge sculpture of mesh netting expands throughout the gallery space, a structure onto which visitors are invited to explore in order to experience the concert in which shakers emit the representation of usually inaudible frequencies created by spiders' vibrations. The final work presented in Particular Matter(s) is
Museo Aero Solar (2007), a gigantic balloon constructed from crowd sourced plastic bags, which stands as a stark juxtaposition of vibrant color when viewed in relation to the darkness of the exhibition's initial rooms. Through finishing the show with a brightly lit room in which one of Saraceno's most iconic works allows visitors to consider the potential for meaningful planetary adaptation, Saraceno invites visitors to exit the show carrying a desire to embrace a call to action.
Silent Autumn, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2022 In Silent Autumn, Saraceno invites viewers to interact with a new body of works that emphasize how a more ecologically measured interaction with non-human species can open up new possibilities for a more equitable and sustainable planetary co-existence. In the gallery space, Saraceno presents works that connect viewers with a multitude of interspecies realities, encouraging us to connect intimately with non-human beings and phenomena. Emblematic of Saraceno's multiple ongoing arachnology projects, Silent Autumn features
Algo-r(h)i(y)thms (2018), an intricate web of threads that examines spiders' non-verbal communication, demonstrating how spiders employ vibrational perception as an adaptational skill to utilize their environment. As Daniel Creahan notes, "through the act of playing, visitors shape a constantly evolving collaborative musical composition through touching the strings of the web, producing vibrations that echo spiderly modes of communication." Silent Autumn also features two projected video works,
WEBSDR (2018) and
The Politics Of Solar Rhythms: Cosmic Levitation (2018), which both examine "vibrational phenomena occurring at scales both cosmic and microscopic".
Silent Spring (2022), a series of glass panels in which pressed poppy flowers are exhibited, momentarily transports visitors from the gallery to Saraceno's studio in Berlin-Rummelsburg where the flowers were taken from. Located on a site formerly polluted by the building's former resident, a photographic film and dye manufacturer, the soil surrounding Saraceno's studio retains traces of chemical colonization: in attempting to reproduce color pigments of nature, residual chemicals were deposited into the factory's grounds, contaminating adjacent soils, rendering all fruits of the soil inedible and forever altering the color of its landscape. In reference to
Rachel Carson's
eponymous 1962 publication,
Silent Spring gently embodies Saraceno's critique of our Capitalocene's approach to nature as an inexhaustible well of material resources. Other works featured in this exhibition are the blown glass works
Pneuma, Aeolus, Aeroscale, Aerosolar Serpens (2018-2021), as well as Saraceno's filter paper strip work,
Calendrier Lun-AIR de Paris (2018) and
An Open Letter for Invertebrate Rights (2020).
Webs of Life, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2021 In Webs of Life, Saraceno encourages viewers to move from arachnophobia to arachnophilia, the title of his ongoing arachnological project. With the use of
Augmented Reality (AR) technology, viewers are able to engage with two giant AR spiders; the
Maratus Speciosus, often referred to as the peacock spider because of its colored markings, and the
Bagheera Kiplingi, the world's only vegetarian spider. As with many of Saraceno's works, the exhibition aims to raise awareness for the protection of biodiversity in an age of climate emergency. Via the Arachnophilia app, a smaller, mobile version of the spiders can be viewed via a smartphone, regardless of location, in exchange for a photo of a spider or web that the user themselves has located. By asking the viewer to look for spiders, Saraceno invites us to take a deeper consideration of our environments and our relationship to the spiders that may or may not inhabit them. By searching within our own environments and subsequently contributing photos to the Arachnophilia network, each user contributes to the ever-growing World Wide Web of arachnology contained within the app. Informed by
Yuk Hui's idea of technodiversity, Webs of Life invites viewers to engage, maintain, and strive for greater interspecies cohabitation. As academic Jan Hogan writes of Saraceno's work, "Tomás Saraceno imagines a future where humans become as sensitive to the environment as a spider in its web. He invites visitors to become participants in his multiple networks and projects. He aims to make us aware of our interconnections with each other and the world."
Movement, Maison Ruinart, Reims, 2021 In
Movement, Tomás Saraceno launched an Aerocene Backpack above the vineyards in Champagne: guided by the region's winds, the backpack traced a flight path in the clouds above Maison Ruinart, creating a unique Aeroglypth. This aerial sculpture, now a permanent installation above the vineyards, can be accessed by viewers through the Aerocene app. After encountering Saraceno's work at the Palais de Tokyo in 2018, Ruinart planned a collaboration that would explore the climate emergency and its damaging effects on our environment.The performance of Movement commenced with a short meditation and poetic reading, followed by the launch of Saraceno's geothermic sculpture above Maison Ruinart.
Movement echoes Saraceno's ongoing concern with the politics of air, a concern shared deeply by Ruinart: the slightest change in atmospheric conditions can have devastating effects on the region's harvest, an omnipresent threat the winemaker's know is set to increase in our age of climate emergency.
On Air, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2018 On Air is Saraceno's 2018 solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Described by the gallery as "an ecosystem in becoming, hosting emergent choreographies and polyphonies across human and non-human universes, where artworks reveal the common, fragile and ephemeral rhythms and trajectories between these worlds", the show aims to magnify the myriad of voices often not heard by human ears. Featuring artworks, workshops, concerts and public symposiums, the atmosphere of On Air threads together a multi-faceted web of relations which are felt without necessarily being verbalized, aiming to move us from an Anthropocene to a post-fossil Aerocene society. The exhibition features the projection
The politics of solar rhythms: Cosmic Levitation (2018), in which particles of dust cluster together, guided by vibrational rhythms of sonic frequencies. The experiment, proposed by Saraceno to the Jaeger Lab at the University of Chicago, questions how acoustic levitation — which suspends particles in the air and examines how measured vibrations from sound waves can aggregate matter — could be used to levitate meteorite particles. Such controlled sound waves oscillate at key frequencies, causing specific particles of dust to levitate, examining the relationship between rhythm and cosmic creation. One of the central works of On Air is
Algo-r(h)i(y)thms, a huge webbed structure composed of thin ropes of differing lengths. Invited to interact directly with the artwork, visitors can "play" the strings which create sonic patterns via the tiny microphones attached to them. As Elda Oreto notes, when played by multiple participants, the structures "produce frequencies similar to those of micro and macroscopic scientific phenomena: from reproducing the signal of courtship of spiders to the melodies of the electrons of galactic nebula." In an interview with Ignant, Saraceno notes that
Algo-r(h)i(y)thms is "an exercise in establishing a communication with something that is distant, inaudible, but which we are a part of… a non-verbal dialogue, a jamming session." Also featured is
Sounding the Air, an aeolian instrument constructed from threads of spider silk which are triggered by the wind and resonate in the air. Live video captures the instrument's movements, converting them into sonic patterns which illuminate
Webs of At-tent(s)ion, creating a multi-sensorial conversation between the two works. Directly influenced by the visitors' movements, conversations and breathing, along with other multi-elemental forces, the work's sonic architectures are constantly in flux, being continuously re-written via the innumerous presences inhabiting the gallery space. In
Passages of Time, dust and other air particles are live-streamed from the gallery's atmosphere — forming part of the installation
Particular Matter(s) Jam Session — and also features a 163,000 year-long video (the length of time it takes for light emitted by the Large Magellanic to reach Earth. Only visible at night in the southern hemisphere, we receive a vision of this spiral galaxy with a 163,000 year delay. Recorded at the salt flats in Uyuni, Bolivia, the video invites us to reconsider our linear notion of time through examining the way airborne matter is influenced by our movements, and how these particles navigate through space directly in relation to our alternating velocities. The exhibition also features the following works:
Hybrid Webs (2018),
Living at the bottom of the ocean of air (2018),
How to entangle the universe in a spider/web (2018) and
Printed Matter(s) (2018).
58th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy, 2019 In
Aero(s)cene, when breath becomes air, when atmospheres become the movement for a post fossil fuel era against carbon-capitalist clouds (2019), Saraceno communicates directly with the surrounding environmental choreography of Venice, visualizing — through a series of installation works — the climate emergency, both on a global scale and in direct relation to the immediate topography.
On the Disappearance of Clouds (2019) — a suspended aerial theater — together with
Acqua Alta: en Clave de Sol(2019), a sonic installation which takes its cue from Venice's high water alarm system, exist in open communication with the movements of Venice's surrounding tides. Shifting with the sounds of water beneath the sculpture, which in turn is moved by the wind and the moon's gravitational pull, Saraceno's multi-sensorial installation encourages viewers to consider the threat of rising sea levels while simultaneously inviting them to consider their position in relation to the climate emergency. In reference to Aerocene, a global community working towards a new global network of interconnected, borderless and post-fossil communities, both works invite viewers to imagine a balanced and ethical cohabitation with our atmosphere. As writer and editor Ann Souter notes, "by making global warming both visible and audible, Saraceno highlights our reciprocal relationship with the elements and suggests alternative ways of responding to our predicament.
Cloud Cities Saraceno's long-term artistic research project (2002–present) draws inspiration from
Buckminster Fuller and other radical architects. The aim of the project is to create a modular, transnational city in the clouds, the realization of which would be a new model for liberating and sustainable building practices. The exhibition Cloud Cities, presented at
Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin (2011–12), consisted of a collection of geometric, inflated shapes that challenge the notions of place, space, future and gravity. Through the exhibition, Saraceno sought to explain how human beings live in combination with their environment. As curator and art historian
Moritz Wesseler notes, "an aspect that is of great importance to Saraceno in this context is that the city's shape and size can be changed continually, subjecting conventional ideas about boundaries and territories to critical scrutiny. (...) The works he creates as part of this exploration can be considered components of sorts for the future cloud-city that can be assembled to create the desired complex in its entirety. But the components also exist in isolation, as independent sculptures or installations, evincing forces and qualities of their own that render them highly fascinating constructs."
Observatory/Airport City Related to Cloud Cities, Saraceno launched an exhibition 'Observatory/Air-Port-City' at the
Hayward Gallery, London (2008). The exhibition was composed of a collection of spheres, each housing autonomous residential units. The network of habitable cells float in the air, combining and recombining like clouds, constructing a flying airport. This is Saraceno's utopic vision: to create a new airborne nomadism.
On the Roof: Cloud City Saraceno exhibited 'On the Roof: Cloud City' in the Iris and B Gerald Cantor Roof Garden at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) New York City (2012). This consisted of a constellation of sixteen large, interconnected modules composed of glass segments and cut in non-identical geometric shapes held in place by steel joints, reinforcements and steel cables. Visitors were able to walk through the installation, which draws its shape from bacteria, clouds, universes, foam and neural communication networks.
In Orbit In Orbit, installed since June 2013 at
K21 Ständehaus, Düsseldorf, spans Saraceno's inquiries into urbanism, natural engineering and communication. Curated by Marion Ackermann, the installation hangs more than 25 meters above the piazza of the K21. Saraceno's installation combines the structure of a spider's web with the vision of Cloud Cities. Over 400,000 visitors to the exhibition have strolled, climbed, laid, on a 2,500 sqm web, dotted with massive inflated
PVC spheres. The movement of each participant is felt by others, exhibiting a potential for new modes of human communication.
On Space Time Foam 'On Space Time Foam', an installation by Saraceno and curated by
Andrea Lissoni, was inspired by the cubic shape of the exhibition space at
HangarBicocca, Milan, appearing there in 2013. The structure was composed of three levels of thin, clear film fixed to the walls and floating at a height of 14 to 20 metres, covering an area of 400 square metres. Visitors were granted access to three levels of the artwork, finding themselves in mid-air, encouraging the loss of spatial coordination.
HangarBicocca has a cubic form. The cube, a geometric form often used by scientists to represent the concepts of space and time, inspired Saraceno to create an installation in which the visitors' movements enact the time variable, thereby introducing the concept of the
fourth dimension within the
three-dimensional space. The title of the work can be traced to
quantum mechanics on the
origins of the universe, distinguished by the idea of extremely fast-moving
subatomic particles that can trigger changes in spatio-temporal matter. Freely inspired by these theories, Saraceno makes their movements metaphorically visible. The installation is a device that calls perceptual certainties into question; it is an element that modifies the architecture containing it, a structure that makes the interrelationships among people and visible space, an attempt to overcome the laws of gravity. As the artist explained, "the films constituting the living core of
HangarBicocca are constantly altered by climate and the simple movement of people. Each step, each breath, modifies the entire space: it is a metaphor for how our interrelations affect the Earth and other universes."
Solar Bell Saraceno has developed a Solar Bell flying sculpture made of lightweight and sustainable materials. Its design is based on the modular
tetrahedron, or four-sided pyramid, invented by
Alexander Graham Bell during his early investigations into manned flight. Bell made important discoveries in the field of
aviation and frame construction, and happened upon the strongest geometrical structure known in the cosmos, the
octet truss. This was the same
spaceframe that
Buckminster Fuller later followed for his
Geodesic dome. 'Solar Bell' was the final project in a series of artworks created to accompany the expansion of the
Port of Rotterdam with the construction of
Maasvlakte 2 in the Netherlands in 2013. Solar Bell Ensemble, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, USA 2016.
Flying Plaza Inspired by Solar Bell, Saraceno developed the idea of entire cities built upon
lighter-than-air structures and sustainable energy technologies, lifted by the wind and suspended above the surface of the Earth. This 'flying plaza' represents an inquiry into public space, which according to Saraceno's vision, can be erected in alternative and fossil-free ways. Saraceno imagines spaces of dwellings as new urban skyscapes: flying buildings elevated by wind power alone, which erase the boundaries defined by geopolitics, and start to respond to local specificities.
Stillness in Motion - Cloud Cities Stillness in Motion — Cloud Cities, was launched by Saraceno and curated by Joseph Becker at the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), San Francisco in 2016. Organized by the SFMOMA Architecture and Design department, the exhibition comprises an immersive, site-specific cloudscape installation of suspended tension structures and floating sculptures, as well as explorations of the intricate constructions of spider webs.
Cloud Cities Barcelona Cloud Cities Barcelona is located in
Mirador Torre Glòries in Barcelona, the artist’s only permanent installation in Europe. This work is made up of 113 spaces that symbolize condensed water droplets, forming a 130 m³ structure accessible to visitors of the observation deck. The structure is suspended from the dome of the Mirador by 6 kilometers of tensioned cable connected through 5,000 nodes, and visitors can explore its interior across different levels ranging from 4 to 10 meters above the floor of the space. With Cloud Cities Barcelona, Saraceno invites reflection on interdependence and the relationships between living beings and their environment, represented by the movement of people within the sculpture’s confined space, where each person’s movement affects everyone else. == Exhibitions ==