‘WE HAVE TO LOSE
THE COMFORT ZONES
OF OUR SILOS
AND RETHINK THE WORLD
TOGETHER’
moving to Italy, returning when he was 12. ‘I struggled
as a kid to belong to a place, moving from one country
to another,’ he says. ‘I thought that maybe we could
belong, everybody, to something called Planet Earth.’
Saraceno obtained his master’s in architecture in
Buenos Aires, but never intended to be a conventional
architect. Encouraged by his teachers, he found his way
to art, studying at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, then
earning a master’s in art and architecture in Venice.
Tanya Bonakdar became his New York gallerist
more than a decade ago. ‘He had a special energy and
creativity that was instantly attractive and had the
potential to develop in a number of different
directions,’ she recalls. ‘His mind could not be confined
by a white cube space.’ Saraceno’s first exhibition with
her, in 2006, explored airborne habitats as a solution
to overcrowding on Earth. He has further developed
the concept with his Cloud Cities, floating architectural
modules that join together in different configurations,
which challenge our notions about freedom of
movement and borders. In 2012, one of these aerial
cities sprang up on the roof of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, inviting visitors to climb inside its
mirrored steel and Plexiglas polyhedrons.
‘Over the years, collaborations with museums
around the world have given him the platform to
execute larger projects and to further the concepts that
have been there since day one,’ says Bonakdar. ‘Each
installation continues to be a step towards realising his
ultimate vision of creating sustainable ways in which
humans can inhabit and sense the environment.’
Spiderwebs are another of Saraceno’s fascinations.
In 2009, the same year he received the Calder Prize,
he presented Galaxy Forming Along Filaments, Like
Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web at the Venice
Biennale. An immersive installation made of elastic
ropes, it examined the parallels between the structure
of a web and the origins of the early universe. Working
with researchers from Darmstadt’s Technical
University, Saraceno developed a way to scan a
spiderweb and reconstruct it in three dimensions on
a human scale. He claims to own the only collection
of (actual) webs in existence, some over a decade old.
When people remark at how beautiful they are, he tells
them they could have their own collection at home
if they just stopped destroying them.
In 2016, Alex Jordan, a biologist at the Max Planck
Institute of Ornithology, came upon Saraceno’s work
while searching for information about spiderwebs. ‘No
one was really looking in detail at the 3D complexity of
the web, except for this artist,’ he says. Jordan reached
out to him with a certain reserve, having worked with
artists before and found the art-science divide too
difficult to breach. But this time was different: ‘I found
Tomás and his studio interested in scientific aspects in
a way that could generate an actual transdisciplinary
investigation.’ The two continue to meet whenever
possible, sharing their thoughts about how the world
we inhabit influences the ways in which we interact.
Saraceno’s Palais de Tokyo show weaves together
various areas of research underpinning his practice.
It includes a new work with around 90 carbon frames,
where different species of spider have spun webs next
to and intersecting one another. He speculates on how
spiders with different degrees of sociability will relate:
what does a spider do with a web that isn’t hers? What
mode of communication will she establish? His team
counted about 450 spiders living in the corners andshadows of the Palais, and he hopes that at least some
of them will attend the show. What’s certain is that
nobody is allowed to kill a single spider during it.
While preparing for the exhibition, Saraceno also
contacted the renowned arachnologist Christine
Rollard at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle,
who turned out to be a fan of his work. She
immediately accepted the chance to work with him
and contribute to a deeper understanding of creatures
that are often feared and despised. Spiders, she says,
are ‘exquisitely sensorial’, feeling and communicating
through touch, scent and more. Saraceno wants to tune
into what they have to say, and orchestrates ‘cosmic
jam sessions’, using ultra-low frequencies to give aural
form to the webs. ‘It’s very urgent to diversify the
dialogue,’ he says. ‘We have the arrogance of thinking
humans are the most successful species – and we
keep decoupling from the rest of the world.’
He has invited three composers to make music with
the spiders on different nights. One is Alvin Lucier, the
87-year-old American experimental music composer
whose landmark work, I Am Sitting in a Room, explores
the playback of sound in a particular space. Reached by
telephone, Lucier laughed delightedly at his memory of
meeting Saraceno: ‘He’s crazy and wonderful. He wants
me to bounce sounds off the moon.’
Another new work is a vast entanglement of threads
that meet up at various nodes. Each one can be plucked
like a guitar string to transmit a natural or manmade
sound – the moon, the sea, even fracking. Some sounds
are live-streamed, others pre-recorded, and they are
accompanied by vibrations in the floor. ‘Sometimes
you touch and you don’t know who else you are
touching, metaphorically,’ says Saraceno. ‘Do I have
a consequence? Do I hear my actions or not?’
Saraceno is a stubborn idealist. His most ambitious
initiative, Aerocene (see page 355), is an open-source
community project that centres upon balloon-like
sculptures that can transport human passengers
through the air, similar to the spider’s method of
releasing a thread and hitching a ride on wind currents.
His accompanying Float Predictor is a journey planner
that indicates the different wind trajectories that will
get you to your destination over the next 16 days.
‘Today, when you book your ticket online, it will tell
you what is the cheapest day,’ he says. ‘But for carbon
sustainability it is not so good.’ What he proposes is
wildly different – giving up control in a symbiotic
relationship with the planet and the sun.
Is he for real? He says yes – but it doesn’t matter. If
art can change the world, it’s by transforming the way
we perceive and live in it. Saraceno urges us to accept
the rhythms of forces more powerful than we are, and
see ourselves as part of one great cosmic web. ∂
‘On Air’, 17 October 2018 – 6 January 2019, Palais de Tokyo,
Paris, palaisdetokyo.com; studiotomassaraceno.org352 ∑
Tomás Saraceno