Web of Relations

Tomás Saraceno, your exhibition “Cloud Cities” at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin gives a broad insight into your work, which bridges the gap between poetic spatial art installation and architecture. How do you start and proceed to work in such a setting, such an impressive museum space?

Back and forth, up and down… It is a new process of trial and error every time, a dialogue with the people, space, yourself. You plan and draw everything, and once you are there you have to be ready to start all over again. You measure the space, you listen, you blow up some provisional meteo latex spheres trying to forecast the weather. Here it should be lifted up a bit more, there it is too dense. You walk back and forth, many times. Then you start to tense the ropes, which now, in Berlin, seem to mix with the old black beams of the former train station. You give more pressure to a sphere, more humidity to the plants, the climate changes. You imagine yourself in between it, the gravity has faded, floating in a three-dimensional world. Multi-universes… cellular social microbial planetary dust… Constellations appear, relative spatial relations, but it’s up to you to confirm them. Spiders appear on the threads and never stop weaving. I hope also flies will enjoy it.

 

You have indeed become known for works that deduce their inherent structure from spiderwebs and you have been working closely with biologists and natural scientists. How would you describe your specific interest in this field?

As a web, as a three-dimensional web in space. Some threads are so long that they have become lines of a space elevator, others reverberate as “string theories”. And music might appear, but it is about how we might play it and where we might listen to it. Where is everybody? – It still remains pretty much unknown... Harmonic melodies, air traveling, a web of social relations… If you remain curious, you will never get bored. Many scientists and writers describe the origin of the universe as a three-dimensional spiderweb. By having discovered for the first time a method to scan and reconstruct a three-dimensional spiderweb – might we learn more about how the universe originated? Now galactic cloud cities or other analogies might appear, maybe so unknown as the universe itself. 94 percent of everything is black matter or dark energy – and only four percent are the planets, water, humans, helium, hydrogen, animals, plants, everything… Might it have been a coincidence to relate the unknown universe to the unknown three-dimensional spiderweb? Even if spiderwebs appear in each corner of our houses, how invisible to our eyes do they still remain, no matter how far or close to us! We are only at the beginning… As a kid, the biggest wish was to watch the sun, the black forbidden spot that will burn your eyes once seen through a telescope.

 

How far do aesthetic aspects serve to explore the characteristics of social systems?

Is there anything without aesthetics? Are you even able to see anything without it? We use our eyes in such a way that a certain interconnectedness remains unconscious, a social system underneath. Biologist Jon Bridle of Bristol University has described this interconnectedness quite clearly in a text on “Biology in a changing world”, which I would like to quote here: “Humans depend on what can be delivered by biological systems,” Bridle states, and “these outputs depend on dynamic and evolving interactions between individuals and species in the ecosystems that they form, and on the resilience of these interactions. A key challenge is the large distances and timescales at which biological processes operate. For example, about a quarter of the rainfall used for cereal production in the US is generated by Amazonian rainforest several months earlier. Unfortunately, global economic systems recognise such inter-dependence only after critical limits have been exceeded. Recent estimates of the ecosystem services provided by tropical forests reveal that $2–5 trillion is lost from the global economy each year due to deforestation alone. The loss of such biological capacity remains unnoticed by markets while the loss of $1.5 trillion from stock markets triggered economic meltdown in 2008.” There are many ways to do something, but there are many ways to do it together, which I guess is more interesting.

 

In some cases visitors become part of your installations, not just by entering it, but by changing the inner stability and coherence via movement and weight. The experience of the individual visitor is a very specific physical as well as sensual one, oscillating between playful climbing and almost flying. How important is this immediate individual experience for your overall concept?

Well, I like to think about this in the sense that it is impossible to walk alone in such a space. Each of your steps influences the behaviour of others by a much faster feedback than in any other medium we have experienced before, like water, earth, etc. It’s a web of relations which appears, easily bringing also the notion of Actors – in the sense Bruno Latour defines it connected to the Actor Network Theory – into consideration. It is like a body-language dialogue, speechless. Feedback loops are more intense in a vibrating spacetime. Maybe there is a sense of responsibility and social engagement that can reverberate beyond that experience.

 

Would you go so far to include a notion of transcendency?

Being beyond the limits of experience and hence the unknowable (in Kant’s theory of knowledge), being above and independent of the material universe – yes, sure. Breath it all, this dark energy… hold it… What a breath! 

 

Your works refer to utopian city models and concepts, including for example those of avant-gardists in the 60s. How important is this influence for you?

As important as many other influences. Call it a big web of relations which interests me.

 

How far, then, is your work driven by a utopian approach, hence a political relevance? Or, to put it differently: can the poetic be political? And should the political be poetic?

On the cover of the book of Documenta X curated by Catherine David, the words “politic poetic” were written, one on top of the other, sharing most of the letters. You could choose which word you would read first. It was up to you to choose the order of it, but it was important that it represented both terms simultaneously. Maybe in the future we are able to read both words at the same time, or we will invent a new word. Polietics? In this endless ecosystem, all strings – and not only humans – are part of this web, from this to other wor(l)ds, out there in orbit! The climate is changing and when it’s winter here, it’s summer in the south... Cloud cities add an extra dimension, up and down, beyond national states of mind!