Introduction

At Les Abattoirs Tomás Saraceno presented Museo Aero Solar as his contribution to a possible Monument for the Anthropocene, a proposed geologic chronological term for an epoch that begins when human activities have had a significant global impact on the Earth‘s ecosystems.

Museo Aero Solar is a flying museum, a collective artwork initiated by Tomás Saraceno and conceived in the course of a dialogue and cooperation with the Isola Art Center in Milan. It is a solar sculpture, which flies by capturing the short waves of the sun during the day, and infrared waves from the Earth at night. This lighter-than-air monument can ride thermals, vortices and convection currents, making visible the “shape” of the atmosphere.

Museo Aero Solar is composed of hundreds of plastic bags and various packaging papers, developed through various exhibitions around the world. Its components were collected in Sharjah (United Arab Emirates), Isola (Italy), Medellín (Colombia), Lyon (France), Rapperswil (Switzerland), Tirana (Albania), Ein Hawd (Israel), Minneapolis (USA) , Bonames / Kalbach (Germany) Carmignano / Montemurlo (Italy) and Arnsberg (Germany). At each step, visitors cut and taped a plastic bag, selected and donated by them, and perhaps added to it by writing, drawing, or signing it.

To stay in the air, the monument will depend on people to follow it, capture it and relaunch it when the sun shines, thus embodying for the organizers an ethos of care, hospitality and an elemental sensitivity crucial to the potential of a “good” Anthropocene. For its participants Museo Aero Solar stands for a different conception of space and energy, and its utopian force resides in the inventiveness of local inhabitants, not in its image: among spontaneous networking action and art, do-it-yourself technology and imagination. Combining low-tech waste materials with sophisticated research in solar flight, Museo Aero Solar represents both past and future.

For Saraceno the floating “monument” points toward a new way of inhabiting Earth, an imagined, alternative future in which civilization is truly solar powered, but also liberated from Earth’s surface to become airborne; a society held, propelled and continually re-cohered by the intensities of the sun-Earth-air relation; a world of flying solar sculptures aggregating like clouds; a world not of flight paths but of nomadic journeys.

A separate section included several of Saraceno’s models for flying sculptures. They generally are constructed from mirror, solar and/or transparent panels, using the latest in lightweight materials and sustainable energy research. The room as a whole documented Saraceno’s exchange with scientists from diverse fields who contributed to the project. Sketches, photographs and printouts (which visitors could take with them), presented the ongoing research. The flying sculptures continue the development the artist explores with his Cloud-Cities and Air-Port-Cities utopian project for airborne habitation of which a large-scale installation was shown at the Metropolitan Museum’s roof garden in 2012.