Tomás Saraceno (b. 1973) is an Argentina-born, Berlin-based artist whose projects devise platforms for ecosocial, participatory, and installative encounters, that host and amplify regenerative forms of knowledge. Connecting across scales and spectra—from the inaudible vibrations communicated along a spider’s silken thread, to the aerostatics of floating sculptures, and the filamentary cosmic web—his work builds bridges of ‘response-ability’ that seek to move audiences towards deeper reciprocity and attunement with other beings in the web(s) of life. For over two decades, Saraceno has led open, multi-access, collective projects that overcome lines of discipline, border and species, expanding on his research into moving beyond arachnophobia and the Capitalocene, towards eco-social justice.
With Museo Aero Solar (2007–) and the Aerocene Foundation (2015–)—an international movement for eco-social justice—he has facilitated fossil fuel-free flight through aerosolar sculptures; grown collaborations with MIT, CNES, and Greenpeace; and activated workshops, festivals and exhibitions across 152 cities, across 36 countries and 6 continents. On January 25, 2020, in Jujuy, Argentina, Aerocene Pacha rose using only the air and the sun, setting 32 world records and becoming the most sustainable flight in human history.
With Arachnophilia (2018–), he has advanced studies into spider/web architectures, biotremology, and interspecies communication, in collaboration with institutions that include Max Planck Institute, TU Darmstadt, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. From developing the novel ‘Spider Web Scan’ to forming the world’s largest, distributed archive of three-dimensional spider webs, and supporting the web portal Nggamdu.org as initiated by the spider diviners of Somié, Cameroon, the research group’s work—featured in Nature and PNAS—expands engagement with arachnid ecologies, moving us from arachnophobia to Arachnophilia.
Saraceno has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2024); Serpentine Galleries, London (2023); Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania (2022); The Shed, New York (2022); Towada Art Center, Japan (2021); Carte Blanche at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires (2017); K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Ständehaus, Dusseldorf (2013); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012); and Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2011). Saraceno has participated in numerous festivals and biennales, including the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale (2020) and the 53rd and 58th Venice Biennales (2009, 2019) and staged artistic interventions with COP20, COP21, and COP26, as well at the World Economic Forum, Davos, in 2017 and 2013. Saraceno’s artworks are furthermore housed in numerous permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany; and The National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, and he has been commissioned for twenty-one permanent, large-scale installations across four continents.
Saraceno was the Director and Lead Professor of The Busch at the IAK Architecture-related Art Institute in Braunschweig, Germany from 2014–2016, and has conducted educational workshops at Columbia and Princeton, as well as in Somié, Cameroon, and Salinas Grandes, Argentina, among other locations. He has collaborated with the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology for over a decade (2012–), and held numerous prestigious residencies including at the Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES) in Paris (2014–2015) and Goethe Institut, London (2016) among others. He has received several prizes, including the Konex Platinum Award in Art and Technology (2022) and the Alexander Calder Prize (2009); and given hundreds of talks and public lectures, most notably at TED and Harvard. With Studio Tomás Saraceno he has published over 20 books, and contributed to numerous other publications.
Saraceno lives and works in and beyond the planet Earth.
View a full curriculum vitae (PDF)
Last updated: April 2025
Aerocene is an era-in-the-making, a community, a non-profit foundation. As a movement for eco-social justice, adrift on air, floating free from fossil fuels, lithium or hydrogen, Aerocene moves us towards an ethical re-alliance with the Earth and its cosmic web(s) of life. Rooted in slower activism and weather-dependent interdependency, Aerocene stands as a platform for climate justice, an eco-social energy transition, human and more-than-human rights, and alternative modes of knowing and sensing. Our work connects beyond disciplines and borders, taking shape through application into art, technology, justice and education.
Initiated by the artist Tomás Saraceno, Aerocene brings together diverse artists, activists, geographers, philosophers, speculative scientists, balloonists, technologists, thinkers, and dreamers from around the world; collaborating with institutions including MIT, Greenpeace, CNES, EAPS. It has grown in parallel with Museo Aero Solar since 2007, and in 2015 the Aerocene Foundation was formally established at COP21 in Paris. Throughout this journey, the Aerocene community has come together across workshops, festivals and international exhibitions seeking to devise collaborative modes of ecological sensitivity increasing public awareness of global resource circulation.
Through open-source, ‘Do-it-Together’ tool-building and testing and flying of aerosolar sculptures and their mobilisation within performance and protest, the community attempts to overcome abusive extractive practices, like oil, gas, and lithium mining among many others, that some humans have imposed on landscapes, ecosystems, communities, and other species. The community has also published the Aerocene Newspaper I and II, which have been translated into Spanish, English, Korean, Mandarin, and counting! On January 25, 2020, in Jujuy, Argentina, Aerocene Pacha rose using only the air and the sun, setting 32 world records and becoming the most sustainable flight in human history. The flight lifted with the message: “Water and Life are Worth More than Lithium”, written by the Indigenous Communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc.
Aerocene is active in 152 cities, across 36 countries and 6 continents.
Join the Aerocene era at aerocene.org!
Travel around the world lifted only by the sun with the Aerocene App.
Arachnophilia is an interdisciplinary spider/web research community founded by Tomás Saraceno. Building on innovations arising from Saraceno’s decade long research into spider/web architectures, materials, modes of vibrational signaling and behavior, the broad aim of Arachnophilia is to move us from arachnophobia to Arachnophilia and beyond the Capitalocene. Arachnophilia’s breakthroughs include: the Spider/Web Scan, allowing for the first time precise 3D models of complex spider/webs, and advancements in biotremology, bioacoustics and biomateriomics. They have been published in journals including PNAS, and featured in Nature. Collaborators include spider diviners from Somié, Cameroon; Max Planck Institute; and MIT.
Research on spider/web architectures began in 2010 when Saraceno made scientific breakthroughs with his development of the Spider Web Scan, a laser-supported tomographic method created by the artist. The artist has since refined, automated, and used this tool to study the functional dynamics of web architectures with collaborators including the Max Planck Institute, TU Darmstadt, and MIT.
Threads of biotremological, bioacoustic and biomateriomics breakthroughs began in 2013, when the artist along with collaborators from the Museum of Natural History, Berlin applied a Laser Doppler Vibrometer (PDV-100) to measure vibrational signals in a planar Nephila web and Cyrtophora tent web. Over the last decade, with Arachnophilia and an extended team, Saraceno has developed specialised web sonification and signalling devices that unveil the hidden musicality of the spider/web.
From these developments came an international series of Interspecies Jam Sessions and Arachnid Orchestras. Beginning in 2014 Saraceno invited a number of musicians and performers to enter into an acoustic dialogue with spider/webs, mediated through the instruments of his Arachnid Orchestra. These interspecies jam sessions experimented with vibration as a transductive force, capable of moving between the sensory Umwelten of anthropos and arachnid.
On the occasion of the 2019 Venice Biennale, in which Saraceno exhibited the Biennale’s first non-human pavilion, Spider/Web Pavillion 7, Arachnophilia created Arachnophilia.net which contains a 3-D archive of spider/web typologies, a biotremological archive, and an archive of maps of spider/web ecologies. As a way of expanding possibilities for vibrational communication across sensory worlds and charting spider/web ecologies globally, the Arachnomancy App was also launched.
Arachnophilia have been published in journals including PNAS, and featured in Nature, along with dozens of other Peer-reviewed journals and publications. Arachnophilia has an international network of collaborators including web-building spiders, ground dwelling spiders, scientists, philosophers, sound theorists, biomateriomic researchers, anthropologiests, musicians, arachnologists, spider diviners from Somié, Cameroon, and institutions such as Max Planck Institute; MIT; Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum; Macquarie University; Natural History Museum, Berlin.
An archive of consultations can be discovered via nggamdu.org, a web portal by the spiders and diviners of Somié, Cameroon.
Can digital and physical clouds come together in life-giving water cycles? Fairclouds is an invitation to join an alliance of Cloudstewards to bring financial and ethical support to the Indigenous Communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc in the fight against lithium extraction on their ancestral lands. Enter into a cloudscape above the Salinas Grandes and become a Cloudsteward by revealing its hidden ecologies, as imagined by a transnational group of contributors.
Cloudcities.org, currently in it’s beta-testing phase, is a growing repository of cloud-based knowledges, activated by an interactive tool for pareidolic ecologies. Users are invited to draw upon the ocean of air and interpret a cloud’s multitudinal relations. A mise-en-Aeroscène: images of cloud formations are selected from the platform’s archive, as collected by the artist Tomás Saraceno and users’ own contributions.
“We are pleased to offer you our service of ŋgam dù spider divination. You are invited to ask a question to the spider, but be aware that it may be modified by us in order to help the spider understand your query.
Spiders could once speak but now communicate using only leaf-cards inscribed with specific symbolic meanings. When asked a question, the spider will respond by manipulating the cards to indicate which direction should be taken, and this will be interpreted by us.
Even if we have asked a question that seems clear, the spider may respond in effect by saying we should ask a different question! Nothing is simple in the world and the spider knows that the questions must reflect this in one way or another.”
—Chef Gamgbé Kounaka, Bollo Pierre ‘Tadios’, Iréné Nguea
STUDIO TOMÁS SARACENO
After studying art and architecture in Buenos Aires, Frankfurt am Main, and Venice, Tomás Saraceno established his studio in Frankfurt am Main in 2005. The studio relocated to Berlin in 2012 and, after a brief interim, moved into the former administrative building of Actien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrication (AGFA) in Berlin-Rummelsburg. The studio gradually activated and renovated the previously unoccupied building, which was constructed in 1916, and the neighbouring multi-story factory. Studio members from multidisciplinary backgrounds, including designers, architects, anthropologists, biologists, engineers, art historians, curators, and musicians work in the hybrid environment of workshop, office, the Arachnophilia Research Laboratory and Aerocene community-enthusiasts.
The system of signs stemming from Saraceno’s artistic practice engenders connections throughout the departments; the variegated roles of each studio member at times personifying the complex structures of the artworks surrounding them. An attunement to the disappearance of clouds and rising tides emerges through the cloud-like structures evocative of the Weaire-Phelan geometry of aggregating foam and soap bubbles. In the context of the current ecological crisis, the rights of non-humans and the non-living are investigated through a lens focused on moving past the hierarchical ethos of the tree of life metaphor to one that recognizes the entangled relationships between phenomena. In acknowledging the symbiotic threads linking all things, the hybrid webs spun in collaboration with the studio’s arachnid friends affirm how even our smallest movements send out vibrations along the web of life.
In an era of ecological upheaval, there is a perceived imperative for anthropocentric worlds to re-attune to other species and more-than-human ways of inhabiting our shared planet. These artistic and scientific enquiries can enable new hybrid encounters and relationships, involving multiple entities: from spiders to humans, from gravitational waves to particles of dust.
Tomás Saraceno is most grateful for the support of Natalija Miodragovic in developing the conceptual background of works and ideas developed until 2015.
Miriam Aller Rodriguez
Giulia Ambrosini
Duncan Anderson
Mateo Argerich
Lars Behrendt
Sascha Boldt
Estefanía Díaz Carrasco
Thomas Charil
Ben Clark
Filippo Corato
Maria Cristina Crespo
Carola Dietrich
Ollie George
Charles Gonzalez
Samantha Grob
Paula Guajardo
Sven Hoffmann
Heinrichs Julius
Georgi Kazlachev
Sarah Kisner
Dario Jacopo Laganà
Olivia Moore
Alan Javier Myers
Lea Nikou
Jaime Norambuena
Manuel Ortuzar
Guido Palmadessa
Max Parnell
Tania Patritti
Martina Pelacchi
Hermanus Du Plessis
Alfredo Ramos
Matthew Raven
Patrick Reddy
Claudia Meléndez Rivera
John Rohrer
Selma Roussel
David Buck Rudolph
Fridolin Domingo del Sante
Jazmin Schenone
Anna-Sophie Schmidt
Gustavo Alonso Serafin
Niki Sidirourgou
Judith Straßenberger
Carlos Alberto Lermett De La Torre
Ilka Tödt
Alberto Vallejo
Isabel de Andres Velasco
Erik Vogler
Filippo Vogliazzo
Philipp Weber
Davide Zucco
Andersen’s
Amaliegade 40
1256 Copenhagen
gallery (at) andersen-s.dk
Pinksummer Contemporary Art
Palazzo Ducale, Cortile Maggiore 28R
Piazza Matteotti 9
16123 Genova
info (at) pinksummer.com
Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte
Juan Ramírez de Velasco 1287
Buenos Aires
consultas (at) ruthbenzacar.com
Tanya Bonakdar NY
521 West 21st Street
New York, NY 10011
mail (at) tanyabonakdargallery.com
Tanya Bonakdar LA
1010 N Highland Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90038
losangeles (at) tanyabonakdargallery.com
neugerriemschneider
Linienstraße 155
10115 Berlin
mail (at) neugerriemschneider.com
Studio Tomas Saraceno
Hauptstrasse 11/12
10317 Berlin, Germany
info (at) t-saraceno.org
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