“You become more aware about the influence that you have within the world and somehow also of how many of the actions that are being produced today are so harmful for the majority of the people who live on this planet Earth. Nonhumans or maybe also humans, right? There are so many ecosystems that coexist with us and we’re kind of becoming more aware of that really kind of entangled relationship that we have with other species. We could maybe rethink what is happening to planet Earth. ” — Tomás Saraceno
Last fall Berlin-based artist Tomás Saraceno (b. 1973, Argentina) was featured in a solo exhibition at Esther Schipper gallery in Berlin, Algo-r(h)i(y)thms, inspired by the activist artist’s arachnophilia. Our friends at Berlin Art Link chatted with him in his studio and at the exhibition.
From Berlin Art Link:
Since 2006, Saraceno has been engaged in arachnid research from the perspective of the web. This work is an exploration of the webs’ and spiders’ behaviour and it materializes in the spider/web archive.
[…] The space at Esther Schipper gallery was transformed into a web-like landscape of nets containing 3.4 kilometres of black cord. The exhibition explored the behaviours of the web-building spider, which is essentially blind and creates an image of the world through the tremors it sends and receives through the web. The web is thus considered a material extension of the spider’s own senses, and—some argue—of its mind. Saraceno’s work, more generally, invites us to rethink the future of our planet from an interspecies perspective.