Tomás Saraceno in collaboration

Web(s) of Life

The Royals Parks, Serpentine South, and online via websof.life
01.06 – 10.09.2023

This summer, the spiders that live in the basement of Serpentine will be free from the hum of the A/C. Their spider/webs, masterful artworks themselves, will vibrate differently in the quiet. At the front desk, humans can book a guided tour to enjoy their exhibition. 

Above, we’ve turned the list of species in decline into our guest list. Swifts, sparrows, dogs, cats, phones squirrels, foxes, rays of sun, gusts of wind, friends and foes, flies, butterflies, bees, the raindrops on spiderwebs, the spiders who wove them, and many others are the creative collaborators of Web(s) of Life. Some have travelled thousands of kilometres, crossing borders visa-lessly above the Brexiteers; we wait for them impatiently. Specially designed sculpture-habitats have been installed on the roof and around the park to welcome them. We hope the magpies will be queuing to enter…One for sorrow , two for joy … Eight for a wish, Nine for a kiss, Ten for a bird you must not miss! Nearby, humans are offered a glimpse of their present-futures: spiders may be open for questions, whether you encounter them in the park or through the diviners in Somié, Cameroon. 

Parts of this exhibition are free from mobile phones and lithium batteries. Under weather vanes and waning weather, the veins of lithium contained inside mobile phones are traced back to the salt flats and wetlands of Jujuy, Argentina, and those who fight to protect them. On site, a Ballad of Weather Dependency intervenes in the gallery building’s energy supply, making the Serpentine wholly reliant on solar power from panels installed on its roof. As the sun disappears behind a cloud, artworks may switch off. This performance is an invitation to human and other-than-human participants in London, online, and elsewhere to reconsider their habits and relations. What behaviours need to change to maintain a stable climate for all inhabitants of these worlds? Power always comes at a cost; better not run on credit.

Independence from the effects of climate change is expensive, and therefore unequally distributed. Even the so-called ‘green transition’ to renewable energy is premised on the development of new technology, which only exacerbates this tendency further. Weather independence in one place produces climate catastrophe in another. For dependency to be shared, this transition must be understood, not only in terms of technology, but also as a highly political matter of social relations. Staging a syncretic encounter across videos, sculptural installations and performative interventions, the exhibition brings attention to the neocolonial structures of extractivism and its ecosocial consequences, as well as to the systems of belief and knowledge that can work against the profiteers of the Capitalocene towards just cohabitation within the Web(s) of Life.

Ballad of Weather Dependency is an intergenerational, cross-cultural, multispecies performance that urges visitors to adapt, change, and modify their activities according to the rhythms of the planet, as many other human cultures, animals and plants already do. The performative work signals a behavioural shift in the way exhibitions are produced and consumed, where visitors become direct interlocutors of energy through their active and responsive participation across its production and consumption.

Web(s) of Life is wholly reliant on solar power from newly installed 27m2 sculpture panels on the Serpentine’s roof. At its peak it produces 5.6 kWh, supplying 8 artworks with a required total of 3.5 kWh, feeding the surplus 1.9 kWh into the national grid. Web(s) of Life is an exhibition that generates more energy than it consumes! Depending on the weather, the exhibition functions in different modes—Sunny (3.5 kWh), Partly Sunny (2.1 kWh), and Cloudy (1.2 kWh)—in which certain installations will switch off, or run at lower frequency to adapt to the available power supply. In Heat Wave Mode, the indoor galleries will be partially closed to humans, who are invited to join other participants, such as birds, spiders, bees, and squirrels in enjoying the multispecies sculptures spilling out of the west wing of the gallery and into the park. 

The ability of participants to swing with these rhythms is part of the performance! As such, they are not limitations or inconveniences, but conditions that gesture to our inescapable and necessary connectedness with other beings and places. No energy is clean, but by generating power for the exhibition on site, its various costs—monetary, social, and ecological—become more immediate. We may have gone solar, still we don’t need a night sun to keep the exhibition going, but can produce enough social energy to change power systems. Technology should be world-changing, not world-ending: join us in weather dependency!

At the South entrance of the exhibition, participants are asked to surrender their mobile phone in an act of a temporary severance. In exchange, those who agree are given an elemental token taken from the periodic table. What results is a display that recalls a taxonomic logic of the Enlightenment; that scientific mapping of knowledge amounts to mastery, or even ownership. Except here a networked technology, reliant on the neocolonial extraction of minerals and data, is re-imagined as a historical practice—a thing of the past.

Entering Web(s) of Life without access to camera and network, participants might instead become sensitive to what cannot be captured through a lens, or shared with the push of a button. In consideration to the ways in which digital steps also leave footprints, this performance invites participants to embrace a digital detachment: what is the ecosocial impact of our screen life? One movement sends vibrations through the webs of life: from the phone in your pocket to the lithium mines in Jujuy, Argentina, this battery-fuelled power dynamic helps prop up a digital memory whilst it erodes another, ancestral cache at the expense of the land and its people.

When visitors return to retrieve their phones, they are invited to offer their signature as an endorsement to the ‘Manifesto for an Ecosocial Energy Transition from the Peoples of the South’ and collect a copy of the Aerocene Newspaper II. The birds will keep calling you is conceived in solidarity with the indigenous communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc, who are fighting against industrial lithium mining on their ancestral lands and with whom the artist has developed an ongoing, collaborative relationship for over seven years.

Nggamdu.org is a web portal by the spiders and diviners of Somié, Cameroon, made at the request of Bollo Pierre ‘Tadios’ following a visit to Somié in 2019 by Tomás Saraceno and Maximiliano Laina, led by the guidance of anthropologist David Zeitlyn, with contributions by the filmmaker Iréné Nguea, Ollie George, Penny Fraser and Denis Ndeloh.

Request your consultation with the spider via nggamdu.org in exchange for a set fee that goes towards the spider diviners’ practice and their community needs.

Certain species of female wasps usurp spider/webs for their nests by laying an egg on the back of the spider, which, as it grows, co-opts the spider’s nervous system. The spider’s attention is then turned away from maintaining its own web, and onto building a resting place for the larvae. Once complete, the larva moults and kills the spider, spinning the zombie web into a hanging cocoon for its own rest in the days ahead.

Under the influence of the wasp, the spider weaves highly characteristic webs of a thicker thread and a different pattern than its usual one. Webs.Life 202.3 (Zombie spider) is a series of embroideries based on these mutant webs, which showcase the brutality, sophistication and beauty of an encounter in which one organism benefits at the expense of another. This dynamic abounds in digital spheres – notably across the ‘World Wide Web’, where the few wield the data of the many and is often accepted precisely for its seductive allure. But how do we resist manipulation, and maintain agency? Can you tell the difference between the spider’s own web and that of its zombie kin?

Pacha is an ongoing audio visual project that portrays the long-standing relationship between the artist, the Aerocene community he founded and the Communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc, in Jujuy, Northern Argentina, who are fighting to protect their land against the rapid corporate extraction of lithium from the Salt Flats, driven by the demand for batteries, which is depleting water resources in the region and contaminating the Earth. 

In Jujuy in January 2020, the aerosolar sculpture Aerocene Pacha rose using only the air and the sun, completely free from fossil fuels, batteries, lithium, helium, and hydrogen, becoming the most sustainable flight in human history. This journey set 32 world records, recognised by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), with Aerocene pilot Leticia Noemi Marques who flew with the message “Water and Life are Worth More than Lithium” written by the Indigenous Communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc, Jujuy, Argentina. 

Three years later, in January 2023, we gathered once again, as national and international geopolitical and commercial interests continue to pressure the basin. Faced with the worsening of the climate crisis and the urgency of the energy transition, the message is: We no longer want to be a sacrifice zone. The transition cannot reproduce the same extractivist, neocolonial politics that have been imposed on the Peoples of the South, amplifying social, ethnic and environmental inequalities. The Rights of Nature movement is striving for rivers, lakes, and mountains to bear legal rights in the same, or at least a similar, manner as human beings. We must listen to the voices of the territories, in defence of water, salt flats and the commons, for an ecosocial energy transition!

Full credits for the film can be found here.

Endorse your support for the communities via exhibition portal websof.life

There are birds you no longer see in the park around the Serpentine. Even the fairly ordinary house sparrow is listed in decline. The spotted flycatcher, the marsh tit and starling, too, are suffering from the proliferation of human settlements. What are the requirements for cohabitation and what can we do to enable them?

Cloud Cities: Species of Spaces and Other Pieces*, is a series of new sculptures installed inside the gallery, on the roof of the building and within the park. Developed in consultation with ornithologists and wildlife organisations, the sculptures provide specially-designed habitats for a range of animals, both native species and visitors to the park, some of which are in decline or in danger of extinction. The sculptures stand as meditations on biodiversity that imagine alternative models for interspecies encounters: nests and water baths for birds, houses for hedgehogs, objects conceived for dogs, nooks for invertebrates, and steps for squirrels to climb. In the event of their sale, the artworks’ contractual agreement includes a certificate of cohabitation that instantiates the animals and plants as co-owners and fellow stewards of the work.

The sculptures’ forms are inspired by cumulonimbus clouds, more commonly known as thunderclouds, which forewarn of stormy weather and occur more frequently as a result of climate change. These works are part of Saraceno’s long-standing project Cloud Cities. This proposal for an alternative form of urbanism brings together constellations of geodesic modules and is inspired by principles within the universe that affect the groupings of cosmic clouds and soap bubbles. Saraceno asks what forms of assembly and urban architecture might emerge when large cities are not only built from a human perspective.

This series is designed in consultation with: Ornithologist Anton Thøger Larsen, Mads Nørgaard Madsen, Butterfly Ambassador for Aalborg Municipality in Denmark and member of the Danish Society of Nature Conservation (DN), Martin Sloth Andersen, Chairman of DN.

*Title taken from French novelist Georges Perec’s collection of writing Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1974)

What do we see in the clouds? What latencies are contained within their waters? As harbouring forms of the atmosphere, clouds have come to shape our imagination in both their physical and digital ubiquity; their various morphologies carry with them messages of weather-presents and futures, as bodies of water in the ocean of air that surrounds us. For the Indigenous communities of the Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc in Jujuy, Argentina, water is life. Crucial to their guardianship and life upon this land, they have long-defended its environment against industrial lithium mining that extracts, per tonne of this ‘white gold’ as much as 2 million litres of groundwater. Lithium mining is water mining.

Over the duration of Web(s) of Life, children were invited to create their own cloud drawings, and optionally donate them as inspiration for a new collective artwork. This evolving project will compose and relate the imagination of children from Jujuy with those in London who participate. Leaning into the fluidities of water, life and imagination, the ocean of air wields a canvas upon which other worlds of ecosocial justice and interspecies conviviality await their reveal.

The project is also an experiment in a new economic approach called Partial Common Ownership (PCO), as developed by Serpentine’s Future Art Ecosystems, RadicalxChange—a movement for 21st century political economies, and Studio Tomás Saraceno. This piece will not be traditionally owned by anyone, but will instead be stewarded by various parties to advance the Salinas Grandes communities in their own stewardship efforts to protect and maintain their biodiverse land.

For further information, please visit cloudcities.org