An international traveler, Tomás Saraceno

Fecha: 2008-05-14 04:07:02por: Iris Atima (info@irismexico.org)


I. Living in the Sky
“These habitations would move like clouds, eliminating geographical and political boundaries, generating human and political communities in continuous transformation and re-definition. These airport-cities would be freely constituted in compliance with international laws, challenging the political, social, cultural and military restrictions presently in effect around the world”.
On Mobility exhibition.

Artist Tomás Saraceno, is "more interested," we read, in how people could start "living in the skies." Saraceno thus "explores the possibilities of air-borne housing as a conceivable solution to the problems of population growth and rapidly changing climates." In an interview with Stefano Boeri and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Saraceno says: "Up in the sky there will be this cloud, a habitable platform that floats in the air, changing form and merging with other platforms just as clouds do. It will fly through the atmosphere pushed by the winds, both local and global... in a permanent state of transformation, similar to nomadic cities." In other words, it'll be a bit like the Helicopter Archipelago...


His vision for the future is articulated through Air-Port-City a conceptual architectural proposal that envisages networks of habitable structures that float in the air. The freedom of their airborne location allows these sections of living space, and related spaces for leisure and work, to be organized within a modular cellular framework. As they join together like clouds, creating aerial cities in constant physical transformation, Saraceno sees these structures as capable of embodying more elastic and dynamic rules related to political, geographical, and cultural borders. Air-Port-City is about to create a floating international city in the sky, kept afloat by solar-fueled Aerogel – a “lighter-than-air” material developed for the aerospace industry-, on the politics of migration; the idea is to establish a residential urban district for migrants which is itself migratory, constantly crossing and blurring boundaries., and the capacity of scientific and technological advancements to upturn our assumptions about what's humanly possible. It all comes together in a project inspired by the organization and policy of an international airport, where international and local laws apply respectively in different parts of the single facility.

"the airports are in different cities and are divided in "air-side" and "land-side"; in the "air-side" you are under the international legislation and each action that you do will be judged according to the international norms. Total control under freedom. Air-Port-City is like a flying airport; you will have the capacity to travel legally anywhere of the world with the advantages of the airports regulation (...) After the unification of Europe it would be created one "europeafroamericanasiaoceania": as the movements of the continents at the beginning of the world, the new cities would persecute their position in the air, to later find themselves in the universe. Of Cirrocumulus to Cirrocumuluscity! Imagine: around the world without passport " (1)

II. Flying Garden
In Saraceno’s Flying Garden series, will be an "invasion" of the sky, "made up of plants, humans and animals. He creates areas filled with Tillandsias (2), Native to South America and Africa, that derive their nutrients from the air. Conceptually, this air-sufficient agricultural model serves as an accompaniment to other platforms for habitation or play, but also suggests the human self-sufficiency that his project envisions.

III. Explorer
Art, architecture, fashion, politics, ecology, engineering, we are looking for programs, promises and proposals in contemporary culture, our time demands some critic revisions, answers and actions, in order to evolve...

Over many years, Saraceno has developed a body of work that relies on research into engineering, physics, chemistry, aeronautics, and architecture to experiment and propose new possibilities for how we live in relation to one another.

Alongside the theoretical development of his ideas, Saraceno undertakes a parallel pragmatic experimentation, he has constructed inflatable architectural structures to be entered, and designed and flew the largest geodesic solar balloon ever built. Saraceno’s sculptural practice models in microscale the future cities borne from his imagination.
Saraceno's large-scale installations have proven if not the possibility of airborne habitation, yes at least human flight through solar energy. In periodic collaboration with the Buckminster Fuller Virtual Institute and several different scientists, he's conceived translucent, Bucky-like structures, and created the largest solar-energy geodesic balloon ever built, the instructions for which he made readily available to the motivated DIY faction.

IV. Visionary arquitect
Saraceno continues the tradition of visionary architects before him, including Buckminster Fuller, Frei Otto, Archigram, and the Ant Farm Collective. But his project is equally informed by the present moment--reflecting a consciousness about waste and conservation, striving for a harmonic balance between mediated and natural worlds, and acknowledging the interdependence of individuals to one another.


V. International traveler
Tomás Saraceno was born in Argentina in 1973; he lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany. In 2006, realiced a photo series from the Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia, comissioned for barbican, an UK Gallery(3). In his pinksummer biography (4), is written: “Lives and works between and beyond the planet earth”. His selected solo exhibitions start recently, on 2004, in Italy, Germany, UK, USA, Spain, Sweden and Netherlands. His galleries sell prints of his travels and works, wich you can collect as an art object, and as a journey memory.

VI. Poet
Saraceno dreams in a world without borders, with cities metaphor of the international airport non-place, meanwhile, he gets that his art takes him to travel by the world presenting his utopia, the one that is not longer Argentine to become cosmopolitan and multilingual. The combination that he obtains between art and architecture has a successful mediatic conjuncture talking about ecology, the search of a more peaceful world.

The Sarraceno works, theoretically are designed for opened spaces, to inhabit the sky, reason why sometimes to see them in the closed spaces of galleries, fairs, biennials, gives the sensation to be present at the claustrofobia of the utopia for sale, promotion, in order to convince us through the system. Some of their pieces even seem "anti-ecological" like the globe in pieces, wich is terribly tragic.

Once the structures are released of Saraceno, that is to say, when their projects inhabit gardens or our skies, I wonder myself: What would happen if instead of being an utopia presented in small scale, it were a reality on great scale?, will it generate an efficient alternative for human and ecological habitats or will be a developing form of future environmental contamination?, the clouds-cities-airports will sail exhibiting their new constructed beauty or will they become like some old buildings in damages structures and spoiled loks or decorated in folkloric styles, or will host aerial vagabonds?

I am sure that I prefer the experience of forests, plantations and gardens, as we know them now. I wouldn’t exchange them for the flying Tillandsias gardens. Which, because they are not eatable and they reproduce easily in humid climates, are considered like authentic plagues in some of their places of origin like Argentina.

Independently of the observations from to the objective possibilities of the utopia presented by Sarraceno, I encounter an incredible beauty in the poetry of its work, condensed in images of strange elegance, utopic questions, the blue immensity...

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...
John Lennon

1. Full text in: http://www.hibrids.net/blog/archives/111
2. Tillandsias have developed the ability to take all their food and water through specially designed cells on their leaves and therefore can exist without any roots for ever. Roots are used by most species to attach themselves and nothing more. Tillandsias can grow in places no other plants can survive including electrical cable on power lines.
3. www.barbican.org.uk
4. http://www.pinksummer.com

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Fecha: 2008-05-14 04:07:02por: Iris Atima (info@irismexico.org)