25.06 – 29.09.2024
Leeum Museum of Art
Seoul, South Korea

Aerocene Seoul has joined the international Aerocene community’s movement, striving for an era where everyone can live and breathe freely. To share Aerocene’s visions and messages, the Leeum Museum of Art presents Aerocene Seoul, a three-month public project that connects Aerocene communities in and around Seoul as part of its public programme ‘Idea Museum’, featuring community activities such as Museo Aero Solar, Aerocene Backpack Workshop, and discursive forums.

For Aerocene Seoul, stories of eco-social and political imaginaries have been woven together, joining Museo Aero Solar from Argentina, Thailand, and South Korea to form a vast canvas that carries messages of hope and resistance from around the world. Notes and drawings supporting the fight for democracy and free public education have been carried from the Museo built by students at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Escuela Puerta Abierta, Argentina. From the Chiang Rai Biennale in Thailand ideas towards more just political structures have been shared. In collaboration with various communities in Yongsan-gu, messages of care and change reflecting environmental concerns have been depicted via the more than 5,000 plastic bags collected in Seoul this past summer. Through more than 40 workshops, participants engaged in assembling these diverse stories into a patchwork that moves towards resilient possible futures. The result is a newly constructed, transnational Museo Aero Solar, a giant, living sculpture installed in the center of the Leeum Museum’s M2. Visitors can walk inside and experience various narratives, functioning as a museum (Museo) within a museum. This process showcases the transformation of plastic bags, typically regarded as waste, into a medium of solidarity that amplifies the voices of the community concerning environmental issues.

Collaborating with prominent regional museums in Seoul, Gwangju, Gyeonggi, Daegu, Daejeon, Busan, Suwon, and Jeju, several Aerocene Backpack Workshops invited participants to come together around this poetic tool for imagining a new era without fossil fuels and new ways of decarbonizing the atmosphere. Providing a message of simplicity, community members were also invited to write messages towards change and hope on the sculpture.

The first workshop was held at the Daegu Art Museum, and the chosen slogan was “No More Apple in Daegu.” The participants discussed the topic and settled on the message after considering the regional situation. Apple cultivation has shifted northward from Daegu to Gangwon-do and other areas, causing farmers to migrate to continue growing apples. Meanwhile, both the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan (MoCA Busan) and the Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art focused on rivers and water. Eulsukdo Ecological Park, where MoCA Busan is located, is widely recognized as a migratory bird site downstream of the Nakdong River. The slogan “Our Water, Home for All” was chosen to acknowledge that rivers and water serve as habitats for both humans and non-humans. Participants in the Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art workshop created the message “Heart of the Wind, Eyes of the Future.” Jeju Island is known as Samdado (meaning ‘Island of Three Abundances’) because of its abundance of “stones, wind, and women,” and the slogan was inspired by the fact that the wind leaves no trace, expressing the desire to keep the earth clean for future generations. In the workshop at the Daejeon Museum of Art, where adolescents participated, the slogan “Our River Reflects Our Future” was chosen by comparing the river to a mirror and discussing how they can enhance their ecological awareness in their respective locations.

The Aerocene Backpack is a portable flight kit enclosing an aerosolar sculpture that floats only with the heat of the sun, without the use of helium, hydrogen, solar panels, batteries or burners, free from fossil fuels. Fully open-source its users are invited to appropriate and improve its functionalities of mechanical, digital and electronic technologies, strengthening a DIT (Do-It-Together) ethos fostered by the Aerocene Community. The Backpack has been borrowed around the world for hundreds of flights.

As part of Aerocene Seoul, the panel ‘Towards eco-social justice’ brought together voices around questions of environmental debt, modes of resistance, and the necessary conditions for a fair energy transition.

Verónica Chavez and Flavia Lamas, activists and members of the Kolla Aboriginal Community Santuario Tres Pozos in Salinas Grandes, Jujuy, delivered poignant statements on behalf of their community that addressed their continual fight for resistance against lithium extraction on their ancestral land. Juan Pablo Olsson Argumedo, an environmental sociologist and advocate for the Debt for Climate movement in Latin America, presented the organization’s work and its mission to lobby the eradication of debt that countries of the Global South owe to those of the Global North, despite the latter contributing the greatest to the climate crisis. Matt Prewitt, president of @radicalxchange, shared an introduction towards Fairclouds, an ongoing initiative by the Aerocene Foundation in collaboration with the Communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc, Serpentine Arts Technologies and RadicalxChange.

During the forum a screening of ‘Fly with Pacha, into the Aerocene’ (2017–2023) was held, directed by Maximiliano Laina and Tomás Saraceno. A message, a film, a journey around the sun with Pachamama, a space-time towards eras of complementarities, Fly with Pacha portrays the long-standing relationship between many ever-growing communities across multiple continents, documenting the ongoing collaboration between Aerocene and the Indigenous Communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc, in Jujuy, Northern Argentina.

Korean edition of Aerocene Newspapers I and II

Aerocene Newspapers I and II advocate themes of sustainability, climate justice, art and science, and activism. The first Aerocene Newspaper was published as part of COP21 in 2015, and introduces the concept of the Aerocene project, which aims for a movement for eco-social justice, adrift on air, floating free from fossil fuels, lithium or hydrogen. The second issue of the Aerocene Newspaper emerges from a long-standing collaboration between the communities of the Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc Basin with Aerocene and many other diverse and living collectives over a number of gatherings that took place in 2017, 2020 and 2023. Although these publications are available as PDFs on the Aerocene website, its Korean edition has been specially published for this project to further disseminate the vision of the Aerocene community.