While enterprises to colonize other planets accelerate, this very same interface between us, the Sun and atmosphere continues to be compromised: carbon emissions fill the air, invisible radio waves develop in a hegemonic algorithm of finance, particulate matter floats inside our lungs. How would breathing feel in a post fossil fuel economy, and what is our response-ability?  

Solar Rhythms suggests a model for a landscape that balances our relationship with, and harnesses the unlimited potential of the Sun. This realization requires a thermodynamic leap of imagination, much like during an eclipse, when only in the absence of light do we become aware of our scale in the shadow of the cosmos. In that moment of alignment between Sun, Moon and Earth, we understand that we rely on a reciprocal alliance between the elements and effects, the shifting winds, the exchange of heat and momentum and the diffusing reflection of solar radiation towards the cosmic extent.

The exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery presented a series of new sculptures and installations that emerged from the ongoing Aerocene project, an interdisciplinary artistic endeavor that seeks to devise new modes of sensitivity, reactivating a common imaginary towards an ethical re-alliance with the atmosphere and environment. Aerocene Constellation 3/2 and its cluster of sculptures elsewhere in the space, construct their form via the scientific experiments that the French National Space Agency conducted during the late 1970s. During his residency at the agency in 2012, Saraceno pursued this research—forgotten for decades—and in Solar Rhythms presented re-modeled versions of the billowing structures. Inflated only by air, lifted only by the Sun and carried only by the wind, these inflatable bodies challenge socio-political atmospheres by trespassing and weaving much needed aerographies anew.

Whilst reconnecting with elemental sources of energy to overcome those extractivist economies of the fossil fuel regime, Solar Rhythms proposes new choreographies and free-floating motifs that propel our aerosolar imaginary forward.