Exhibition tip – Tomas Saraceno at MUDAM

Tomas Saraceno‘s Galaxies Forming along Filaments, like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web was the ultimate photo-magnet at this year’s Venice Biennale. No doubt the work he’s exhibiting at ReThink: Contemporary Art and Climate Change in Copenhagen is meeting with the same fascination from the audience. I’ve seen his artworks in numerous group exhibition. They are always striking of course but i never really took the time to sit down and watch his work with enough attention.

Tomas Saraceno, Galaxies Forming along Filaments, like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web, 2009 (detail)

MUDAM gave me a great opportunity to do just that. The Luxembourg museum is currently dedicating one of its exhibitions to the Argentinian artist with videos, sketches, photo documentation of his experiments, prototypes of inflatable structures anchored to the floor of the galleries, etc.

View of the exhibition © Photo: Andres Lejona

The artist’s suspended gardens and nomadic architecture follow the steps of the structures conceived by Peter Cook, Yona Friedman, Buckminster Fuller and the members of Ant Farm. Saraceno’s vehicles are “lighter than air”, they are powered by solar energy and made with materials such as aerogel, an extremely low-density solid derived from a gel in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with a gas.

Tomás Saraceno, Sharjah/Flying Garden/Air-Port-City (working title), 2007. © Photo: Andres Lejona

His Air-Port-City is an ongoing experiment that interconnects various living areas floating in the air through a system of modules. Saraceno’s architecture is ethereal and delicate, it is poetical and utopian but because they are ruled by regulations similar to airport ones, his cities also challenge existing political, social, cultural and military boundaries. They are truly international. Inhabitants will survive eating the produces of the “Flying Gardens” made of plants that can survive the constant changes in spatial and temporal conditions. There will be ‘airplants’ for example. These plants, from the genus Tillandsia, feed on rain, dust, insect matter, dew and whatever nutrients the air brings to them.