Tomás Saraceno opens “Ancestral Futures” at Munich’s Haus der Kunst: two decades of ecological art

Haus der Kunst in Munich has opened the major solo exhibition of the artist Tomás Saraceno, titled “Ancestral Futures”. The presentation includes more than two decades of ecological and collaborative projects by the Berlin-based Argentine artist, known for blending art, architecture and science — as Colossal reports.

At the centre of the exhibition stand spiders and their webs — a metaphor and a concrete tool for the networks that sustain life. Interactive installations invite visitors to crawl through giant structures, while the ten-year series “Webs of At-tent(s)ion” places several species of spiders inside the museum, where they spin their sticky structures in special boxes. The constant return to the web, Colossal writes, is a reminder that we are all connected to one another and that nature’s processes are cyclical.

Saraceno has also adapted his well-known solar balloons for the museum: an immersive cave built from plastic bags collected by citizens inflates with the visitors’ own help, as they pedal stationary bicycles to generate the energy needed. Inside it, visitors are enveloped by a multicoloured mosaic of brands and waste — evidence of the culture of disposability and human consumerism.

Perhaps the most impressive parts of the exhibition were born from the collaboration with the Indigenous communities of the Red Atacama, in the Salinas Grandes basin in northwestern Argentina. Eleven weavers lent their hand-woven blankets, presented together as a soft space for rest, while the following galleries are filled with sand, water and salt. Several works refer to the project “The Sanctuary of Water”, which the artist and the people of Salinas Grandes are developing together — in solidarity with the communities’ resistance against lithium mining in one of the world’s richest lithium regions. Their fight, the museum stresses, highlights the continuing legacy of colonial exploitation: while international corporations profit from resources such as lithium — essential for technologies such as electric cars — the environmental and social costs are borne by the local communities.

The exhibition “Ancestral Futures” will remain open at Haus der Kunst until February 7.