Reading time: 2 minutes
18.02.2017
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, USA
December 17, 2016 – May 21, 2017
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presents the exhibition Tomás Saraceno: Stillness in Motion—Cloud Cities, by artist Tomás Saraceno, on view at the museum December 17, 2016 through May 21, 2017. Organized by the SFMOMA Architecture and Design department, the exhibition includes an immersive site-specific cloudscape installation of suspended tension structures and floating sculptures, as well as explorations of the intricate constructions of spider webs.
“Visually provocative and conceptually rigorous, Saraceno’s practice merges art, architecture and science in a compelling, pragmatic and poetic way,” said Joseph Becker, associate curator of architecture and design at SFMOMA.
Stillness in Motion—Cloud Cities is part of Saraceno’s larger, long-term project titled Aerocene, the artist’s vision for a future era in which humanity minimizes the impact on the planet’s fossil-fuel resources, and instead resides in collective airborne cities.
“Stillness in Motion—Cloud Cities is about becoming airborne, not to fly but to float in the air at the speed of solar aerostatics, from cumulonimbus cities to the cosmic web,” said Saraceno. “Aerocene is an invitation to shape a post fossil-fuel epoch, in a cloudscape of interconnected spheres of practices that include open, participatory platforms of knowledge production and distribution; models; data; and sensitivity to the more-than-human world. These airborne cities floating among the clouds (just as Earth floats in the cosmic plane) call for scalable mental, social and environmental ecologies.”
In the exhibition, visitors are encouraged to wind their way through and below a geometrically complex array of cords and reflective panels, forming a cloud of 10,000 nodes suspended in the air by tension and connected to the gallery walls, floor and ceiling. This site-specific work is inspired by multiple phenomena and structures, including the social construction of spider webs, stellar and atmospheric clouds, bubble and foam geometry and social and neural communication networks.
Intended as a collective sensorial experience, Saraceno’s immersive installation works are captivating spaces that challenge viewers’ relationships to the world. His work resonates with several other great experimental thinkers whose radical work exploded the boundaries of art and architecture in the mid-20th century —from the structural explorations of artists like Gyula Kosice, to the utopian impulses of Buckminster Fuller; from Italo Calvino’s fictional universes to the futuristic urban visions of Archigram in London and the countercultural movement embodied by the multidisciplinary work of Ant Farm in the Bay Area.
Saraceno’s exhibition underlines SFMOMA’s longstanding commitment to experimentation and conceptual practice in art and architecture, and his airborne cities build upon the forward-thinking radicalism and progressive social change which has continually been a focus of SFMOMA’s Architecture and Design collection. Stillness in Motion—Cloud Cities illuminates the powerful and inspiring connections between art, science and architecture at the gallery, urban and even planetary scale.
share this:
05.03.2022
Blog
From January 27 to April 2, 2022
04.03.2022
Blog
Del 5 de febrero al 12 de marzo de 2022 en Unión, Espacio para artistas, CDMX
22.01.2022
Extract
The Immovable Tâm Liêu Âm
EXTRACT is an online section where we share some of the texts published by Temblores Publicaciones, Terremoto’s publishing house. We present the sixth extract of this section, LIFEFORCE: Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds by The Immovable Tâm Liêu Âm, published on the occasion of the exhibition The Liquid Gates of Time, presented at the Rubin Center at the University of Texas at El Paso in 2021. This catalog seeks to account for the works produced by “-O-“. Through their practice, the collective exposes the extractive and violent nature of border institutions, as well as the nation-states themselves when it comes to naming otherness and their stories.
12.01.2022
Marginalia
Through this section, monthly, we invite agents of the artistic system to share a selection of images related to their practice or current interests. Images are published daily in the header of our website and shared through our Instagram profile. At the end of the month, the complete selection of images is published together with a text that contextualizes them. Here is the selection of December 2021.
