Tomás Saraceno
Tomás Saraceno’s immersive installation works are visually arresting spaces that challenge viewers’ relationship to the built world. Stillness in Motion — Cloud Cities offers a model for the utopian cities of the future, conjuring an era in which humanity ceases to negatively impact our planet’s fossil-fuel resources, and instead becomes airborne in collective sustainable environments. In this exhibition, visitors wind their way through and below an array of cloud-like, geometrically complex cities, suspended in the air by tethers connecting the structures to the gallery walls, floor, and ceiling.
Trained as an architect and visual artist, Saraceno’s research-based practice draws from scientific investigations into physics, biology, cosmology, and engineering. His work has deep sociological motives, with undercurrents of human interconnectivity and universal engagement in the pursuit and provocation of a utopian future. In Stillness in Motion — Cloud Cities, his visionary proposals for airborne cities build upon the artistic and architectural experimentation, forward-thinking radicalism, and progressive social change of the 1960s and 70s.
Exhibition Preview
Tomás Saraceno: Building “future flying cities” with spiders
Argentinian artist and architect Tomás Saraceno discusses his installation at SFMOMA, Stillness in Motion—Cloud Cities (2016). He describes how the piece illustrates his vision of “future flying cities” built in collaboration with spiders and other nonhumans, inviting visitors to imagine radical, alternative ways of living on Earth.
This video originally appeared on sfmoma.org as “Tomás Saraceno: Building “future flying cities” with spiders”
