ART-PRESENTATION: Carte Blanche to Tomás Saraceno ON AIR

An artist trained as an architect, Tomás Saraceno deploys insights from engineering, physics, chemistry, aeronautics and materials science in his work. He creates inflatable and airborne biospheres with the morphology of soap bubbles, spider webs, neural networks or cloud formations, which are speculative models for alternate ways of living for a sustainable future.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Palais de Tokyo Archive

In 2015, Tomás Saraceno achieved the world record for the first and longest certified fully-solar manned flight. During the past decade, he has initiated collaborations with renowned scientific institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Max Planck Institute, the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, and the Natural History Museum London. The exhibition “Carte Blanche to Tomás Saraceno ON AIR”, at Palais de Tokyo, is an ecosystem in becoming, hosting emergent choreographies and polyphonies across human and non-human universes, where artworks reveal the common, fragile and ephemeral rhythms and trajectories between these worlds. As a hybrid ecosystem, ON AIR is made of a myriad presences, both animate and inanimate, that meet and cohabit within it. Some voices become quiet, whilst others, perhaps those less often heard by human ears, are magnified. The exhibition functions as an ensemble for silent voices, performing the hidden scores that link events and sensibilities, earthly and cosmic phenomena – weaving a web of relations that cannot be described but maybe can be felt. The exhibition proposes a space and time that makes manifest the forces and entities that float in the air, and their interactions with us: from CO2 to cosmic dust, from radio infrastructures to reimagined corridors of mobility. Thus, the invisible histories that compose the ecologies we are part of invite us to poetically rethink different ways of inhabiting the world – and of being human. While activities that mine the Earth for resources continue to threaten entire ecologies, ON AIR celebrates new ways of thinking about our relation with the planet, through new modes of knowledge production. This is to open itself up to the debate and global challenges posed by the Anthropocene, a word proposed to define the current epoch we live in, in which some human activities leave an impact so important that they profoundly modify terrestrial ecologies. ON AIR echoes Tomás Saraceno’s practice as it gathers numerous collaborators and collaborations, bringing together scientific institutions, research groups, activists, local communities, visitors, musicians, philosophers, non-human, and celestial phenomena, all of whom equally take part in the evolution of the exhibition.

Info: Curator: Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, Palais de Tokyo, 13 Avenue du Président Wilson, Paris, Duration: 17/10/18-6/1/19, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 12:00-24:00. www.palaisdetokyo.com