Tag Archive for 'Tomas Saraceno'

“from the clouds, and these meteoric regions, some all-swelling name” (Aristophanes, The Birds)

Hello hello SuperForesters

I’d like to share with you the work of Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno.  It lifts my heart…

Tomás Saraceno’s Air-Port-City is an ongoing project, investigating the politics of migration, the potential of solar energy, and the capacity of scientific and technological advancements to upturn our assumptions about what’s humanly possible. The basic idea is the creation of a floating international city in the sky – inspired by the organisation and jurisdictionboundaries of international airports, where international and local laws apply respectively in different parts of the single facility – constructed from geodesic bubbles and low-density solar-fueled Aerogel (yes!), moving with the winds – constantly crossing and blurring boundaries with the freedom to continually change, move and reshape. As described for the On Mobility exhibition:

These habitations would move like clouds, eliminating geographical and political boundaries, generating human and political communities in continuous transformation and re-definition. These airport-cities would be freely constituted in compliance with international laws, challenging the political, social, cultural and military restrictions presently in effect around the world.
Up in the sky there will be this cloud, a habitable platform that floats in the air, changing form and merging with other platforms just as clouds do. It will fly through the atmosphere pushed by the winds, both local and global, in an attempt to equalise the (social) temperature and differences in pressure. It will be a sustainable and mobile migration. These aerial cities will be in a permanent state of transformation, similar to nomadic cities.

Saraceno’s “endless photo” shot in Solar de Uyuni in the Bolivian Andes, the largest salt lake in the world – the surface reflecting the sky creates the illusion of standing suspended among the clouds.

Saraceno’s small scale anticipations of his grand scale vision include plantlife: he “landscaped” the Air-Port-Cities using airplants which can derive all of the nutrients and water they need from air, without soil – windowfarms in the sky!

He also created the largest solar-energy geodesic balloon ever built! You can read an interview with Tomás here and here he is  speaking about his current exhibit in Copenhagen:

Saraceno also initiated the Museo Aero Solar project: a solar-energy air balloon, completely made up of reused plastic bags, with new sections being added each time it travels the world, changing techniques, drawings and shapes, and growing in size every time it sets sail in the air. As they describe it,  “the core of the museo resides in the inventiveness of local inhabitants, not in its image: among spontaneous networking action and art, do-it-yourself technology and dreaming, it is a voyage back/forward in time”.

And he has a recent installation, the beautifully named “Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spiders Web” – a complex geometry constructed from elastic ropes, inspired by the discovery that our universe is structured with galaxies clustered into filaments, leaving huge voids of nearly empty space.

“without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form”

(Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Trading Cities 4 – Ersilia)

Are we going to live in borderless bubble cities in the sky, moving with the wind, a literal and ever changing “small island”? Perhaps not, but Saraceno’s concepts, realisations, ideals and allusions? – my heart, my heart.

Love

P