The current 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, titled May You Live in Interesting Times (running through November 24th), features Tomás Saraceno as one of the 50 artists invited by this edition’s curator, Ralph Rugoff. The two new installations presented in the Giardini and the Arsenal’s Gaggiandre, provide a space for reflection and attunement, to exercise our sensitivity towards the entanglements of all things.

The Spider/Web Pavilion 7: Oracle Readings, Weaving Arachnomancy, Synanthropic Futures: At-ten(t)sion to invertebrate rights!, in the Giardini, presents a nonhuman pavilion. Transcending national representation it claims the rights and presence of invertebrates, spiders included, at the Biennale Arte 2019. Spider/Web Pavilion 7 echoes spider divination methods practised in different parts of the world and celebrate the ability to forecast meteorological events, or extraordinary ones, through the observation of other species’ behaviour. Inviting our senses to expand towards new forms of embodied cognition, Spider/Web Pavilion 7 attunes to a non-verbal language that amplifies our response-ability to each other. Its floor shakes at very low frequencies, at the rhythm of vibrating spider/webs, inaudible and yet sensible for the voices we might need to hear.

As part of the Spider/Web Pavilion 7 public program, a series of interactions will take place during the time of the exhibition, from different forms of divination and future-telling with the Arachnomancy Cards to multidisciplinary exchanges between invited guests, both human and nonhuman.  At the same time, an ongoing collective exercise of mapping against extinction was made possible through the launch of the Arachnomancy App and the online Arachnophilia Archives of spider/webs.

At Arsenale’s Gaggiandre, Saraceno presents Aero(s)cene: When breath becomes air, when atmospheres become the movement for a post fossil fuel era against carbon-capitalist clouds. Orchestrated around two main artworks: the sculptural installation On the disappearance of clouds and the sound installation Acqua Alta en clave de Sol, Aero(s)cene oscillates throughout the day at the rhythm of the seaside, performing an aerial choreography of water, air, planets and stars, all tied by cycles of transformation.

Through this composition, the rising tides of Venice generate the rhythms of a new era that allows us to hear beyond our range of attention. As carbon clouds become readable, global warming becomes audible, forecasting the many urgent scenarios of displacement triggered by their reverberation across the disrupted planet’s ecosystems.

Extending an invitation to attune to our sympoietic futures, the installations at Venice Biennale celebrate the radical interconnectedness of all things, both living and nonliving, and serve as spaces of care and attention, to multiply perspectives and weave a participatory storytelling against extraction and extinction. Together, they act as interfaces constantly modified by different sociabilities, performing the need to raise awareness and sensitivities towards the threads of connectivity along which the complexity of life unfolds.