CARTE BLANCHE: TOMÁS SARACENO AT PALAIS DE TOKYO

By Patricia Avena | December 13, 2018

Tomás Saraceno encourages us to rethink the way we live in the world!

On Air is the fourth edition of the carte blanche exhibition series that offers selected artists the opportunity to appropriate all the exhibition spaces of the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris. For the occasion, Tomás Saraceno has made his greatest project to date which brings together some of his main works, installations and unpublished creations. An interactive project that links art and science and that makes the Palais de Tokyo a place of unique sensory experience. This multidisciplinary purpose continues the artist's research on the relationship between humans and non-humans. A collaborative and evolutionary project designed to imagine new ways of inhabiting the world.

Ph: Daiel Avena

On Air is presented as an ecosystem in motion that hosts a choreography of several voices between humans and non-humans, where the works reveal the rhythms and common, fragile and ephemeral trajectories that unite these worlds. On Air is built thanks to the multitude of these presences - animated and inanimate - that coexist there.

Tomás Saraceno chooses to enclose spiders that will weave cobwebs, concentrate their attention on them to reach ours; vibrate those threads where the site will become its territory or a body in slow extension. A body that will resonate since the sound of the spiders will be activated: they will beat their rhythm that will be reverberated like a music. A sensitive music, because the illuminated cobwebs will react to its surroundings, to the movements of the air stirred by the visitors.

By making visible stories that connect us with our environment, Saraceno encourages us to rethink our way of inhabiting the world and to exist in it. Continuing with its artistic and scientific research around spider webs that inspire spectacular installations, the project exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo aims to celebrate an interconnected culture and promote new ways of knowledge production.

The exhibition is exhibited as a set that reveals the strength of the entities that inhabit the air and the way they affect us: from carbon dioxide (CO2) to cosmic dust, from infrastructures and radio frequencies and even new corridors of air mobility. These invisible stories that make up the nature of which we are part, invite us to rethink poetically the way we inhabit the world and revalue our way of being human.

As predatory industrial activities explode the Earth, deplete its resources and threaten the ecology, On Air celebrates new ways of imagining a free of borders and fossil energies planet through new modes of knowledge production. Thus, the exhibition responds to the challenges posed by the Anthropocene, a termthat describes today’s Earth era, originated when human activities began to have a global impact on the terrestrial ecosystem. This is the case of Aerocene activities, an interdisciplinary artistic project initiated by the Argentine artist that seeks to reactivate a common imaginary to collaborate ethically with the atmosphere and the environment inviting visitors to engage and participate collectively in a harmonization exercise planetary.

Eager to transcend our perception, to explore and to be inspired by that of other beings, Tomás Saraceno builds a more human world, much wider than the field of our perspectives, a polyphony where sounds, movements, vibrations of species and others coexist: phenomena, the microscopic and the cosmic.

Under this perspective, carte blanche is an opportunity to bring together multiple collaborators from a wide variety of fields: scientific institutions, activists, philosophers, local communities, musicians, animals, celestial phenomena and even visitors, also invited to participate in the life of the exhibition that will be enriched and transformed permanently through workshops and seminars.