Wallpaper 10

t’s August, and Berlin, like most of Europe, is in the

grip of a major heatwave. It’s 6am and already too hot.

The Wallpaper* team are en route to join the Aerocene

community members at Helenesee in Brandenburg,

near the Polish border, for a test launch of a solar-

hybrid sculpture – a key step towards realising their

fully solar-powered Around the World project.

Tomás Saraceno first launched Aerocene in Paris

in December 2015, during the UN’s Climate Change

Conference COP21. He presented a series of lightweight

spheres, Aerocene 10.4 and 15.3, ‘inflated by the air,

lifted by the sun and carried by the wind’, designed

to circumnavigate the globe by hitching a ride on

jet streams ‘without the burning of fossil fuels, and

without using solar panels, batteries, helium or

hydrogen’. Since then, the Aerocene project has grown

into a foundation dedicated to fostering ‘a common

imaginary towards new ways of co-inhabiting the

Earth’. It explores the potential for sustainable flight

and even a new way of life in the clouds, independent

from national borders, encouraging collaboration

with other species with which we share the planet.

To date, Aerocene sculptures have travelled more

than 6,000km in the air. In 2015, one sculpture set

a world record for the first and longest fully solar-

powered, manned flight, nearly three hours, over

White Sands, New Mexico. The dream is to send

people around the world – to turn our species into (^) »
Enclosed in a portable backpack, the Aerocene Explorer is available to borrow from official stations
in seven countries, allowing anyone to launch their own aerosolar sculpture and explore the skies
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Tomás Saraceno: Aerocene