Tomás Saraceno

Tomás Saraceno (born 1973 in San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina) is an Argentina-born, Berlin-based artist whose practice connects art, architecture, natural sciences, astrophysics and engineering. His floating sculptures, community projects and immersive installations explore new ways of inhabiting and sensing the environment, bringing together different forms of knowledge and proposing new relationships between humans, non-human beings and the atmosphere. For more than two decades, Saraceno has developed open, participatory and collective projects that engage with ecological and social questions, including Museo Aero Solar and Aerocene, as well as his research into spiders and their webs. Since 2007, Aerocene has developed in parallel with Museo Aero Solar as an interdisciplinary artistic community exploring new forms of ecological sensitivity and an ethical collaboration with the atmosphere. The Aerocene Foundation was formally established in 2015, and the project has since developed through workshops, exhibitions, open-source tools, research and aerosolar flight experiments. Its sculptures are designed to float through the heat of the Sun and infrared radiation from the Earth, without fossil fuels, while the wider Aerocene community connects art, technology, science, education and climate justice. Another important strand of Saraceno’s practice is his long-term research into spiders and spider webs. This work led to Arachnophilia, an interdisciplinary, distributed and intercultural community that brings together artistic, scientific and situated forms of knowledge through a shared affinity with spider/webs. Building on Saraceno’s collaborative research into spider/web architectures, biomaterials, biotremology and behaviour, Arachnophilia seeks to change perceptions of spiders and webs and to develop new ways of understanding relationships between humans and other species. Saraceno has collaborated with the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology since 2012 and held a residency at the Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES) from 2014 to 2015. From 2014 to 2016, he was Director and Lead Professor of the Busch at the Institute for Art and Architecture-related Art (IAK) in Braunschweig, Germany. He has also given talks and lectures internationally, including at TED, Harvard and the World Economic Forum. His work is held in permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the National Gallery of Denmark. His work has been exhibited internationally, including Event Horizon at Cisternerne in Copenhagen (2020), Aria at Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence (2020), and ON AIR at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2018). In 2019, his work was presented at the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, while his projects have also been exhibited at institutions including the Serpentine Galleries, The Shed and the Museum of Old and New Art. Through these interconnected bodies of work, Saraceno continues to explore alternative ways of sensing, inhabiting and relating to the world, from the atmosphere and cosmic networks to the intricate architectures of spider webs.