Tomás Saraceno: How Spiders Build their Webs
For his show at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, the artist created an interactive ‘parcours’ to shed new light on humanity’s changing relationship to nature
For the fourth iteration of the Palais de Tokyo’s ‘Carte Blanche’ series – where a single artist is invited to transform the entirety of the Paris museum’s cavernous 13,000 m2 exhibition space – Berlin-based Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno has conceived a massive black and white parcours. His installations encourage visitors to reflect on their place within the infinitely complex networks that structure our existence, from the minutiae of dust particles and the vibrations of spiderwebs to the collisions of galaxies in the universe. In so doing, the exhibition, which is titled ‘On Air’, explicitly situates itself within the ecologically conscientious conversations around climate change and humanity’s changing relationship to nature in the age of the Anthropocene.
For instance, in one section titled ‘Webs of At-ten(s)ion’, the visitor is invited to consider the aesthetic contributions of non-human producers, notably spiders. In a large, almost entirely pitch-black room, the only illumination emanates from a series of spotlights carefully trained on the silky threads of 76 elaborately constructed spiderwebs. These ‘hybrid webs’, as the artist calls them, are spun by dozens of ‘unrelated solitary, social or semi-social spider species’ that were made to inhabit the same spaces at various moments. With each consecutive ‘spider collaborator’ building off the work of the last, the results are intricate, spectral architectures, vast and delicate like the vaulted naves of gossamer cathedrals.
