Horizonte de eventos [Event Horizon] brings together Tomás Saraceno’s recent investigations into the universe—understood as an expanded domain of interconnections—and into his “Cloud Cities,” his vision of modular and transnational cities suspended in the air. As models of sustainable and emancipatory constructive practices, his floating and interconnected sculptures create a scenario that speculates on alternative forms of cohabitation and seeks an ethical commitment to the atmosphere and to planet Earth.
Nourished by the fields of art, architecture, astrophysics, and the natural and social sciences, Tomás Saraceno’s artistic practice unfolds as a sequence of traces, paths, and constellations that reveal the relationships binding the microscopic, the global, and the cosmic. The sculptural works Zonal Harmonics, composed of orbits sustained solely by their mutual tension, speculate on the variations of velocity and geometry in the trajectories of celestial bodies and their interrelations in space and time. The physical dynamics conveyed by these works extend from microscopic particles to planetary gravitational forces.
Their configurations float in space: arcs appear to bend, recombine, and converge like molecular helical structures; within them, filaments enclose miniature universes… universes that Saraceno encounters again in the intricate three-dimensional spiderwebs—long considered by cosmologists as analogies of the “cosmic web” we inhabit—which the artist has studied with arachnologists and scientists for over a decade.
Saraceno has approached key principles of social organization: cooperation, cohabitation, and hybridization. These principles take material form in the prototype of a “Cloud City” presented in the gallery space.
Suggesting a conceptual shift of attention toward more-than-human phenomena, Saraceno reminds us that we all float within a cosmic cloud, and proposes new sustainable and ecological ways of living on Earth by imagining possible alternative futures.
