Biennale Arte Venice

Viale dei Giardini Pubblici (Giardini Biennale), 30122, Venezia

Tel. 041 5218711 Fax 041 5218704 Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

11.05 > 24.11, 2019

Aero(s)cene: When breath becomes air, when atmospheres become the movement for a post fossil fuel era against carbon-capitalist clouds
Location: Arsenale Gaggiandre
"When clouds appear, Like rocks and towers, The Earth's refreshed, With frequent showers."
Clouds are disappearing. As CO2 and other atmospheric pollutants rise, new clouds of a noxious nature arise with them, in turn dispersing the tropospheric clouds whose reflectivity sustain the planetary thermic balance.
Saraceno's work for the Arsenale presents a post fossil fuel, emergent cloudscape in a tidal scenography, where the moon's gravitational pull duets with the rising sea phases of global warming. Cluster-like structures inspired by the Weaire-Phelan geometry of aggregating foam and soap bubbles. Moving into ongoing Aero(s)cenes they resonate with Aerocene, a global community building a new ecology of practice and reactivating a common imaginary towards an ethical collaboration with the atmosphere and the environment, free from borders, free from fossil fuels.
These Aero(s)cenes oscillate throughout the day at the rhythm of the sea tides, performing an elemental choreography. The directors of this aerial theatre range from planetary drifts of carbon-capitalist clouds to the anthropo-cumulus of the petrochemical pole of Porto Marghera towering over the bells of the San Francesco della Vigna Church, appearing on shifting horizons.
Water and air, planets and stars, are tied by cycles of transformation. Every change is refracted in this fragile tension, calling for new ways of thinking, feeling and knowing multiple atmospheric threads of interconnection. Through this composition, the rising tides of Venice generate the rhythms of a new era that allows us to hear beyond our range of attention. As carbon clouds become readable, global warming become audible, forecasting the many urgent scenarios of displacement triggered by their reverberation across the disrupted planet's ecosystems. Clouds floating at the bottom of an ocean of air become the notations of a score that calls for this needed awareness. Aero(s)cene proposes how to float differently, re-examining freedom of movement whilst preserving earthly cloudscapes, resonating across planetary boundaries.
Spider/Web Pavilion 7: Oracle Readings, Weaving Arachnomancy, Synanthropic Futures: At-ten(t)sion to invertebrate rights!, 2019
Location: Giardini
For the Giardini, Saraceno present a new Spider/Web Pavilion. Spider/webs are nonhuman pavilions, transcending national representation. Weaving in the interstices between branches and door frames after a rain shower, they are oracles of living bodies, scripts of fortune divination, always in dislocation between national pavilions. Entangling cooperative constellations, these multi-being life forms trace maps of attunement to the astral scores. In the context of the current ecological crisis, named the Sixth Mass Extinction, invertebrates such as arachnids and insects are disappearing at an accelerated pace, with major consequences for the environment and ecosystems. While invertebrates make up more than 95% of animal species, most countries lack ethical guidelines and regulations regarding their nonhuman rights.
Spider/Web Pavilion 7 features an interspecies collaboration that re-defines territories as ecologies, crafted by the collaboration of humans and nonhumans. It claims the representation of the rights and presence of invertebrates, spiders included, at the Biennale Arte 2019. To understand why extinction is happening, ecosystems have to be thought of as webs of interactions, where each living being's ecology co-evolves, together with those of others. By focusing less on the animals and more on their webs, we exercise a new ecology of practice. Interactions are less scientifically inventoried than individual species, but they are the threads along which the complexity of life unfolds. Webs are at once the spiders' extended bodily cognition and a materialisation of the ties linking organisms and their environments.
Intensive agro-farming and pesticides, global warming and the industrial exploitation of resources add up to the widespread arachnophobia nourished by horror movies and other negative representations of invertebrates, accelerating their biological annihilation and perpetuating an ecological disaster. Against the mass commodification of nature and the self-destructive cultural and economic power structures of the present, Spider/Web Pavilion 7 engages with different forms of knowledge and echoes spider divination methods practiced in different parts of the world. It celebrates the ability to forecast meteorological events, or extraordinary ones such as tsunamis, through the observation of other species' behaviour.
 Saraceno Tomás - b. 1973 Argentina - lives and works in Berlin