Tomás Saraceno

Tomás Saraceno
Born	1973 (age 50–51) San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina
Nationality	Argentinian
Known for	Installation Art, Sculpture

Tomás Saraceno (San Miguel de Tucumán, 1973) is a contemporary artist. He is best known for his large-scale, interactive installations and floating sculptures, and for his interdisciplinary approach to art. His work explores new, sustainable ways of sensing and inhabiting the environment, the result of research into the origins of the observable universe, arachnology and the potential future for airborne dwelling.

Saraceno launched the Aerocene in 2015; an open-source, community project for artistic and scientific exploration of environmental issues. Saraceno is the first person to have scanned, reconstructed and re-imagined spiders’ woven spatial habitats, and possesses the only three-dimensional spider web collection in existence.

Education and Artistic Career

Saraceno studied architecture at Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires in Argentina from 1992 to 1999, after which he studied art and architecture in postgraduate work at Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de la Nación Ernesto de la Carcova and Städelschule. He was directed by Daniel Birnbaum (curator of the 53rd Venice Biennale) and studied under professors Thomas Bayrle and Ben van Berkel. In 2003-2004 Saraceno participated in the course „Progettazione e Produzione delle Arti Visive”, held by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Olafur Eliasson at Venice University (IUAV).

In 2009, he attended the International Space Studies Program at NASA Center Ames (Silicon Valley, California). In 2009, Saraceno exhibited work at the 53rd Venice Biennale , and won the Calder Prize. In 2012, he was the first residing artist at the Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA), resulting in a strong and ongoing collaboration. Saraceno’s installations have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale of 2003 and 2009, as well as at the Sao Paulo Biennale of 2006, among others.

He has held residencies at Centre National d’Études Spatiales (2014–2015), MIT Centre for Art, Science & Technology (2012–ongoing) and Atelier Calder (2010), among others.

Saraceno has been recognised as the recipient of several awards: 16. Bundeswettbewerb des Bundesministeriums für Bildung und Forschung (1st prize), 2003; Fondo Nacional de las Artes-Argentine Italia-Venezia IUAV 2003-2004; Hessische Kulturstiftung Award and Residency in Rotterdam, 2003-2004; Calder Prize, 2009; 1822-Kunstpreis, 2010.

During the past decade, he has initiated collaborations with renowned scientific institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Max Planck Institute, the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, and institutions of the Exhibition Road Cultural Group, among them Imperial College and the Natural History Museum London.

His work has been widely exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Most notably, these include; Aerocene, at Solutions COP21, Grand Palais, Paris; Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions, at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; Becoming Aerosolar, at 21er Haus, Belvedere, Vienna (all 2015); In orbit, at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein- Westfalen K21, Düsseldorf (2013–ongoing); On the Roof: Cloud City, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012); Cloud Cities, at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2011–12), among others. Saraceno’s work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin; among others.

Teaching

Tomás Saraceno directed the Institute of Architecture-related Art (IAK) at Braunschweig University of Technology, Germany, from 2014 to 2016. He lectures for institutions and organizations worldwide.

Selected Works and Projects

Aerocene

Aerocene is a project that aims to explore environmental issues scientifically and artistically. It consists of sculptures that are kept in the air by the Sun's heat and by infrared ratiation.

Aerosolar sculptures were officially presented during the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP21, at Grand Palais, Paris, 2015, after that a similar prototype has been tested in November at the White Sands Dunes of New Mexico. On November 8, 2015, it broke world records by achieving the longest and most sustainable certified flight (without fossil-fuel, solar panel, helium or batteries) ever registered: During approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes, seven people were lifted up in White Sands’ desert landscape. With a net lift of more than 250 kg, the payload of the “D-O AEC Aerocene” solar sculpture has no precedent in the long history of manned solar balloon flight attempts.

The project has evolved from Tomás Saraceno’s residency at L’Observatoire de l’Espace, CNES. Led by Saraceno, the project’s team is composed of leading scientists and engineers, including collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), Braunschweig University of Technology - Institute of Architecture-related Art (IAK), TBA21 Academy, Red Cross Red Crescent, and numerous universities, research centers, cultural and art institutions, and museums around the world.

Aerocene Explorer

The Aerocene Explorer is a flight kit. Participants can hack the devices pack, create their own lightweight sensors, and lift them up. Data collected with the Aerocene Explorer can be uploaded and shared with Aerocene’s open-source online community, via an interactive website that encourages participants all over the world to share their experiments, photos and videos, comments, and innovations.

Museo Aero Solar Community

The “Museo Aero Solar” group is an open-source international community, initiated in 2008 by Tomás Saraceno in conversation with Alberto Pesavento. The community organizes events around the world to turn plastic bags into lighter-than-air sculptures, creating airborne flying museums. Sending a message for sustainability, Museo Aero Solar retakes and transforms a pollutant. The resulting collection includes more than 20,000 plastic bags culled from countries including Colombia, Cuba, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Palestine, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates and the United States, amongst others.

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.

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.

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 2,500sqm 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.

Spider Webs

Since 2008, Saraceno has conducted research in his Berlin studio into the woven habitats of spiders. This research was born out of Saraceno’s interest in the origins of the cosmos and the structure of spacetime. The Earth, being set within a web-like structural dimension was the inspiration that propelled the research into comparisons between this, and natural phenomena within our planet; namely, spider webs.

In developing this line of inquiry, Saraceno pioneered the invention of the first machine of its kind capable of scanning, digitising, and measuring a three dimensional spider web. The first scan in history was made on a Black Widow spider’s web and was first presented in 2010 at the exhibition ‘14 Billions (Working Title)’ at the Bonniers Konsthall in Norway. Developed over two years in collaboration with arachnologists, astrophysicists, architects and engineers, the installation depicted the black widow spider’s web on a 1.17 scale and was composed of 8000 black strings connected with over 23,000 individually tied knots, spanning 400 cubic meters. This installation provided the visitor with the opportunity to observe themselves in the act of becoming a community by being immersed in this interconnected woven habitat.

The secondary output of this research are the ‘Hybrid Webs’ - the collective term for a series of sculptures devised by Saraceno. Each sculpture, made entirely of spider silk is designed to appear as a unique, geometric galaxy floating in infinite space. Creating the sculptures means incorporating webs woven by spiders who are social, asocial or between the two. During the building period, the sculptures are turned onto each side, allowing gravity to aid the interweaving of silk from different sorts of spider. The works’ titles reveal the technical specifications of each sculptural element; the genus and species of spiders employed and the time taken by each spider to complete its web. The final sculpture is thereby an emblem of an encounter which might not otherwise have succeeded, and so prompts a reflection on human coexistence with ourselves and the natural world.

‘Hybrid Webs’ have been exhibited worldwide: Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin (2012); at the Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin, and at Museo di Villa Croce, Genoa, Italy (2014); at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; at the Louvre Museum, Paris; at the Chicago Architectural Biennial, Chicago; Cultural Center, at Espace Muraille, Geneva (2015); at MARCO, Museum for Contemporary Art, Monterrey, Mexico; at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, USA; at the Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt; at the Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai; at the Istanbul Design Biennial, Istanbul (2016); and at Pinksummer Contemporary Art, Rome (2016)

Saraceno has also developed a line of inquiry into the sound properties of spider webs. In collaboration with arachnologists, musicians and sound engineers based in Singapore and elsewhere, Saraceno has harnessed the structural properties of spider silk, transforming the web into a musical instrument. Since spiders do not possess an auditory system, they perceive the world around them with pressure and vibrations that come from their own movement, for example web-plucking. A cobweb is therefore a sensory object, an extension of a spider’s body and the vibrations communicated via this practice are used for attraction, hunting and other social interactions. Saraceno has succeeded in amplifying these inaudible vibrations and web-pluckings into acoustic rhythms. This was presented by Saraceno at the ‘Arachnid Orchestra Jam Session’, curated by Ute Meta Bauer at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2015). The focus of this exhibition, which included a run of live performances, was to push the boundaries of interspecies communication. This insight into non-human modes of communication helped formulate a more complex understanding of interspecies cohabitation – an idea at the fore of Saraceno’s vision.

This research has also been presented in the major solo exhibition ‘Cosmic Jive’ at Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art (2014) and Saraceno's first solo exhibition in his native Argentina titled 'How to Entangle the Universe in a Spider Web' at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires (2017).

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.

Other Prominent Works

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.”

Galaxies Forming along Filaments, Like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web

Galaxies Forming along Filaments, Like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web, curated by Daniel Birnbaum, was presented at the 53rd Venice Biennale ‘Fare Mondi/ Making Worlds’ in 2009. The artwork compared the universe with a spiders web, drawing on the phenomenon that groups of stars and other matter are strung out in space like shining beads of water along invisible strands of thread. The installation consisted of a lacy, bulbous shape formed of and suspended from interwoven elastic rope, stretching to the floor, walls and ceiling.

Permanent Installations

2017, University of South Florida, Tampa, USA.
2015, Cloud Cities / Air-Port-City, Domaine du Muy, Parc de sculptures contemporaines, France.
2015, Sundial for Spatial Echoes, Aker Brygge, Oslo, Norway.
2008, On clouds (Air-Port-City), Towada Art Center, Towada, Japan.
2007, Flying Garden, EPO Munich, Germany.

Collections

Saraceno’s work is represented in public and private collections including:

Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL, USA
Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany
Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, USA
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden
The National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark
Esbjerg Kunstmusem, Esbjerg, Denmark
Istanbul Modern Art Museum, Istanbul, Turkey
Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany
Boros Collection, Berlin, Germany
The Collection of Juan Vergez, Buenos Aires, Argentina
BSI Art Collection, Switzerland
Mudam Musée d‘Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg
Collezione La Gaia, Busca, Italy
Fondazione Pierluigi e Natalina Remotti, Camogli, Italy
Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples, Italy
Fondazione Edoardo Garrone, Genoa, Italy
Luma Foundation, Zurich, Switzerland
Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland

Art Market

Saraceno is represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York City; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Pinksummer Contemporary Art, Genoa; Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen; Ruth Benzacar Gallery, Buenos Aires.

Publications

Saraceno, Tomás. 2016. Tomás Saraceno. 163,000 Light Years. Monterrey: MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey.
Saraceno, Tomás. 2015. Aerocene. Berlin: Studio Tomás Saraceno.
Saraceno, Tomás, and Mario Codognato. 2015. Tomás Saraceno: Becoming Aerosolar. Vienna: Belvedere.
Saraceno, Tomás, and Joseph Grima. 2014. Cosmic Jive: The Spider Sessions. Genoa: Asinello Press.
Saraceno, Tomás, Meredith Malone, Igor Marjanović, Inés Katzenstein, and D. L Weaire. 2014. Tomás Saraceno: Cloud Specific. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Saraceno, Tomás, and Sara Arrhenius. 2011. Tomás Saraceno: 14 Billions (Working Title). Milan: Skira.
Saraceno, Tomás, Marion Ackermann, Daniel Birnbaum, Udo Kittelmann, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. 2011. Cloud Cities. Berlin: Distanz Verlag.
Saraceno, Tomás, and Juliane von Herz. 2010. Tomás Saraceno: Cloud Cities/Air-Port-City. Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag.

Personal Life

Saraceno lives and works in Berlin.

Online References

• World’s first fully solar certified manned flight [1]
• 53rd Venice Biennale [2]
• UN Climate Change Conference Paris COP21 [3]
• L’Observatoire de l’Espace [4]
• Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), [5]
• Calder Prize [6]
• TBA21 Academy [7] [8]
• Museo Aero Solar[9]
• Becoming Aerosolar [10]
• Hayward Gallery [11]
• Hangar Bicocca [12]
• K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen [13]

External links

• List of exhibitions by Tomás Saraceno