Air

Tomás Saraceno Born 1973, San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina Lives and works in Berlin, Germany Our experience of an airborne virus has challenged us to reimagine the air we breathe. No longer simply empty or invisible, air is now more clearly a shifting mix of gases containing fine particles, aerosols such as dust, pollen, soot, smoke and — potentially — also pathogens. Long fascinated by the air, Tomás Saraceno has created a new suspended installation, Drift: A cosmic web of thermodynamic rhythms 2022, offering spaces for rest and reflection, where ‘the slow movement of the spheres invites deep-time thinking, in tension with the short-termism of eco-suicidal extractivism’. 1 For ‘Air’, Saraceno fills GOMA’s central atrium gallery with 13 floating mirrored spheres. Walking through this gleaming field, we might imagine ourselves as particles, only microns in scale, drifting through the air, as if carried by a single breath; or as part of a larger, more celestial movement, a companion to Planet Earth. Given the continual motion of the universe we inhabit, Saraceno speaks of moments of stillness as illusory. Drift: A cosmic web of thermodynamic rhythms ‘seeks to activate our awareness of this at micro, meso and macro scales’, says Saraceno, ‘by increasing our sensitivity to the effects of our movement within the cosmos’. The installation is an expansion on earlier work based on infrared radiation balloons launched into the upper reaches of the atmosphere by the French Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), Paris, where Saraceno was artist‑in‑residence in 2012: The sculptures, made of two different lightweight materials, are experimental models charting a path towards new technologies of sustainable human flight. Out in the world, the mirrored section would reflect part of the Sun’s radiation, thus controlling the temperature inside the air envelope, preventing it from overheating. This insulation is important to sustain daytime flight. Then, the transparent part helps to maintain the temperature inside the envelope (and hence its buoyancy) during the night, since it holds the infrared radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface — the solar heat that the planet accumulated over a day. Drawing just enough, but not too much heat would enable a fluctuating floating trajectory, a woven choreography in the air, free from fossil fuels, drawing upon the thermodynamics of the planet. 1 All quotes by Tomás Saraceno are from conversations with the author, 16 June 2021. Tomás Saraceno / Aeroke 5.3: towards an Aerocene epoch 2019 (installation view, ‘Tomorrow is the Question’, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark 2019) 83 Atmosphere