And I do it together with colleagues, friends, activists, students, scientists, and those whose livelihoods may be at risk due to the choices of multinational companies whose labor or products exploit the land and the climate, those who live under the threat of not being able to continue their journey on this planet.
#FLOATING FOUNDATION ARK FREE#
So I do not only ask what it might be to float free from fossil fuels, I actually do it. For me, it’s that world of wind currents, the sun, spiders, webs, and terrestrial and cosmic dust. And at this point, you should be asking: For whom? For whose world? We all contain multitudes. So some of my practice is material and has such practical resolutions. Photography by Studio Tomás Saraceno, 2009 Courtesy of the artist Andersen’s, Copenhagen Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles Pinksummer Contemporary Art, Genoa and Esther Schipper, Berlin. With the support of Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Mudam Luxembourg and Fondazione Pier Luigi e Natalina Remotti. Spiders weave together with me their works and their worlds, just as humans from around the globe can float with the wind currents using the Aerocene App, a sort of digital foray into 59 steps to be on air. For me, then, DIT focuses on the ability of the collective to do so.
I am thrilled when they define me as a conceptual artist, because at that point, you have to ask: Who are “they”? Have you ever met a spider critic? When a local spider shows up to my exhibition I am thrilled, and if they nest in my world or reproduce into it, even better! There’s a real world there-it’s why my work can’t remain only in concept.Ī large part of the spirit of my practice is what I now call a “Do-It-Together,” or DIT, ethos, the together including a bit of a weird family, with humans, non-humans, more-than-humans… This is, of course, a play on the concept of DIY, or “Do-It-Yourself,” that focuses on the ability of the individual to create things sometimes, hopefully at the margin of the formalized, hierarchized, structures of capital. I tend to be practical inside the world of art, practical in my world of art, where my spectators are spiders and spider webs, the dancing dust, the wind currents… the parallel universes.
I love how things can change, and who knows what I will be 10,000 years from now? Maybe we’re caught, traveling in some threads of a spider ballooning… entangled in Laurie Anderson’s sound transmissions coming through our elbows, served as a recipe by Rirkrit, a light beam of Olafur, crossing the earth with Jol as a neutrino…īut yes, some of my existence-when I’m not sleeping or meditating, because then I am in another conceptual dimension of reality-is practical. Tomás Saraceno: I don’t like to close any doors. Do you consider yourself a conceptual artist? Or maybe you are an inventor (a patent for a mechanism can, of course, be seen as a text-based conceptual art piece)? The use of instructions as a method of creating artworks is often mentioned in connection with conceptualism. Iaroslav Volovod: One of your earliest works is a set of instructions for making a geodesic solar balloon called 59 steps to be on air by sun power/Do it Yourself (2003). Building upon concepts such as these not to abandon the earth, but to better attune to what it is that floats in the air with us-from CO2, particulate matter, and viruses to earthly and cosmic dust particles-Saraceno takes us a step closer toward this new era, working for the first time with a material that posits the sculpture as a working prototype for a balloon that is able to float around the world, fueled only by the air we breathe and the heat of the sun. Moving Atmospheres resonates with the most daring concepts of Russian avant-garde, which suggested that people, buildings, and even entire cities should become airborne. 1973, San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina lives and works in Berlin)