Spider webs, soap bubbles and legendary visionaries like Buckminster Fuller are just some of the sources of inspiration for artist Tomás Saraceno, born in 1973. For the first time, the exhibition “Tomás Saraceno. Cloud Cities" from September 15, 2011 to January 15, 2012 as part of "Dornbracht Installation Projects" in the Nationalgalerie in Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Aktuell - Berlin a large installation by the artist that takes up the entire space of the Historical Hall, which approx. Showing 20 of his works together.
The artist calls his works, which are organic spatial networks sometimes inhabited by plants and sometimes only held up in space by black rope nets, “biospheres”. In 2009, with his work “Galaxies Forming along Filaments, like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider's Web” at the Venice Biennale, Saraceno tensioned works in a room with black ropes, analogous to a spider's web.
The starting point for the artist's work, who initially studied architecture, is his interest in our current and future living environment. With his works, he pursues the idea of a “realizable utopia” with full scientific meticulousness. The experimental approach of “Air-Port-City”, which the artist has been developing for years, is decisive for this. Inspired by the “Airport City” of the same name in Frankfurt, where the artist lives and works, Tomás Saraceno uses this approach to conceive possibilities for architectural living spaces as cell-like, floating cities. Saraceno also creates works for public spaces. The “Museo Aero Solar” has been flying around the world since 2007: a huge solar balloon whose skin consists of thousands of used plastic bags, and which is supplemented with more plastic bags every time it lands and continues to fly in different ways.
In this case, the title of the exhibition creates a multifaceted frame of reference. The concept of “cloud” or cloud is essential to the artist’s work. The cloud as a metaphor represents the artistic intention to examine the meaning of territory and borders in our contemporary (urban) society and to explore the possibilities of sustainable development of human living space. This space is not limited to the earth, but is thought by Saraceno to extend into outer space.