Tomás Saraceno

In 2021, the durational community project Nggàm dù was launched as part of the Berliner Festspiele’s Immersion programme. Described as “a web portal by, with and for the spider diviners of Somié, Cameroon”, Nggàm dù invites audiences to learn about the historic, trans-generational practice of ŋgam dù divination that is practiced across the borderlands of Cameroon and Nigeria, consult with the spider oracle for an agreed donation, and in turn support locally-run projects throughout the village.

On January 28, 2020, from Salar de Uyuni in Salinas Grandes of Jujuy, Argentina, Saraceno led the world's first manned solar-powered free flight during Fly with Aerocene Pacha.

On the occasion of the 2019 Venice Biennale, Tomás Saraceno launched the Arachnomancy App. Through this app, users are encouraged to notice, document and map spider webs they encounter in both wild and urban spaces. This app also uses the Arachnophilia biotremology archives to realise vibratory modes of interspecies communication that mobile devices make possible.

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.

The Aerocene Foundation is a non-profit initiative initiated by Tomás Saraceno in 2015, that aims to explore environmental issues scientifically and artistically through a diverse international community of artists, architects, geographers, philosophers, thinkers, speculative scientists, explorers, balloonists and technologists. The project's activities include the testing and circulation of aerosolar sculptures that are lifted into the by the heat of the Sun and infrared radiation from the Earth's surface.

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.

Aerosolar sculptures were officially presented during the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP21, at Grand Palais, Paris, 2015, shortly after the world first prototype (the D-0 AEC) test in the White Sands Dunes of New Mexico. On November 8, 2015, the D-0 AEC made its maiden voyage as the most sustainable flight, without fossil-fuel, solar panel, helium or batteries: During approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes, seven people were lifted up in White Sands' desert landscape only through the heat of the sun. With a net lift of more than 250 kg, the payload of the D-0 AEC aerosolar sculpture has no precedent in the long history of manned solar balloon flight attempts.

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.

He has lectured in institutions worldwide, and directed the Institute of Architecture‐related Art (IAK) at Braunschweig University of Technology, Germany (2014–2016)

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

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).

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', 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.

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.

Beginning in 2012 and based on a concept and long-term research by artist Tomás Saraceno, the Aerocene App is based on the Float Predictor, an online digital tool developed by the Aerocene Foundation and Studio Tomás Saraceno in collaboration with Lodovica Illari, Glenn Flierl, and Bill McKenna from the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), together with Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) with further support from Imperial College London, Radioamateur, and the UK High Altitude Society.

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.

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."

In 2009, he attended the International Space Studies Program at NASA Center Ames (Silicon Valley, California). That same year, Saraceno exhibited in the 53rd Arte Venice Biennale "Fare Mondi/Making Worlds", curated by Daniel Birnbaum, and won the Calder Prize.

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.

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.

The artist established his studio in Frankfurt am Main in 2005 and later relocated to Berlin in 2012, where he moved into the former administrative building of Actien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrication (AGFA) in Berlin-Rummelsburg. A team of studio members from multidisciplinary backgrounds, including designers, architects, anthropologists, biologists, engineers, art historians, writers, and musicians, work directly with Saraceno in the studio's hybrid environment.

For more than two decades, Saraceno has activated projects aimed towards an ethical collaboration with the atmosphere, including the sculpture series Cloud Cities (2002–) and Museo Aero Solar (2007–), a community-organised initiative that transforms waste plastic bags into flying, aerosolar sculptures. These projects later grew into the Aerocene Foundation, a non-profit organization devoted to community building, scientific research and artistic experiences. Together with Saraceno in 2020, Aerocene launched the certified, untethered flight Fly with Aerocene Pacha, achieving thirty-two world records across Female and General categories for the flight's distance, duration and altitude—lifted using only the heat of the sun and the air.

Saraceno's first installations were exhibited at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2002 and again at the Venice Arte Biennale in 2003, as well as at the São Paulo Biennale of 2006. In 2003–2004 Saraceno participated in the course "Progettazione e Produzione delle Arti Visive" (Design and Production of Visual Arts), held by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Olafur Eliasson at Instituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV).

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.

Tomás Saraceno studied architecture at Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires between 1992 and 1999, after which he studied art and architecture in a postgraduate program at Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de la Nación Ernesto de la Cárcova – both courses were taken in Buenos Aires. Saraceno then moved to Europe to complete his postgraduate studies at Germany's Städelschule. There, he was directed by Daniel Birnbaum (curator of the 53rd Venice Biennale) and studied under professors Thomas Bayrle and Ben van Berkel.

Tomás Saraceno (San Miguel de Tucumán, 1973) is an Argentine contemporary artist whose projects, consisting of floating sculptures, international collaborations, and interactive installations, propose and dialogue with forms of inhabiting and sensing the environment that have been suppressed in the Capitalocene era.