Tomás Saraceno AndHis 6th Sense For Art

Originally from Tucumán, Argentina, Tomás Saraceno took the NYC art scene by storm this year with his latest exposition named ‘Particular Matter(s)’, a 30m2 multi sensorial journey presented at The Shed cultural center. The star of the exhibition: a giant spider web immersed in darkness and a foggy environment where visitors will have the chance to experience the vibrations spiders use to communicate with each other, as an analogy that basically states that we’re all connected and tangled, and these connections go beyond race and species, even.

Saraceno’s ‘Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web’ piece already gained him the nickname “The Art World’s Amazing Spider-Man” by The New York Times, which is a pretty cool accomplishment by itself, especially for a contemporary Latino artist. “Close your eyes, shut your ears and feel the vibrations” is how Saraceno recommends you to enjoy this metaphoric set up, a reminder of how all living things depend on each other. For this immersive experience, lights go out and you become blind like a spider in the dark and you’re guided by the vibrations, caused by the recordings of sound waves produced by dust hitting and the interaction of the spiders with the web–Tomás calls it “a haptic concert”.

This arachnid piece was already presented in Buenos Aires, Venice and Tokyo, making this installation an international sensation with an Argentinian background–let’s raise our mates for that! Saraceno’s message is also one of environmental preservation, pointing how indigenous people have a very different relationship with nature and their surroundings, focusing on preserving biodiversity and ecosystems.

This eco-friendly message can also be seen in ‘Aerocene’, “an interdisciplinary community that seeks to devise new modes of sensitivity, reactivating a common imaginary towards an ethical collaboration with the environment and the atmosphere, free from carbon emissions”, founded by Saraceno. Their manifesto reads: “As an ever growing research and experimental practice, Aerocene is open-source and collaborative. It consists of a dedicated and diverse global community of practitioners who collaborate to promote and enact environmental awareness and atmospheric sensing experiments, imagining new infrastructures of planetary mobility and ethics. By collaboratively developing, testing and launching aerosolar sculptures, Aerocene seeks to open up the imagination towards an emergent cloudscape, un-tethering a new era of planetary attunement, restoring the thermodynamic balance of the Earth, free from borders, free from fossil fuels”.

Saraceno is also the mind behind ‘Aerocene Pacha’, a flying sculpture very similar to a hot air balloon that holds the record for being the first time a human benign floated in the sky being impulsed by nothing other than the sun and the air we breath, thanks to solar panels, batteries and helium. Yes, this means no fossil fuels were used for this, making this ambitious and ground-breaking project an amalgamation of art, science and activism. Pacha is the Andinian concept of the cosmos connecting everything on the surface of the Earth with the confines of the universe, uniting time and space. ‘Aerocene Pacha’ is another reminder of our interconnections as living creatures and our intertwined destinies.

Tucumán’s Spider-Man has managed to combine environmental consciousness with innovation and artistry, which is a remarkable task in itself. Saraceno could just soak up the fame in his Berlin headquarters, but he chose to do something meaningful with his art and we respect him for that. Now it’s your turn, Tom Holland (just kidding… or not).

Sources:

El Planeta Urbano’s Article

Studio Tomás Saraceno

Aerocene

Artishock Magazine’s Article.