The man rethinking how we live on Earth

Tomás Saraceno explores different ways we can inhabit this planet – in collaboration with other species, and in “cloud cities” that float in the sky. As a new exhibition of his work opens at The Shed in New York, the Argentine artist explains how he’s attempting to rescue lost narratives.

“There are many wisdoms embedded in cultures still alive today… by rescuing some of these narratives that somehow are getting lost, we might be better off,” says Tomás Saraceno. For his latest exhibition at The Shed in New York, the Argentine artist draws on some of these embedded wisdoms, working with a community of “spider diviners” in Cameroon and even collaborating with spiders in what he calls “interspecies communication”.

Trained as an architect, he believes that artists and scientists should work together – and has dissolved the boundaries between different disciplines in his works, which include a solar-powered balloon that can carry humans and “cloud cities” floating above the Earth.

“We need to learn to move differently, or relearn some other form of moving from the past,” Saraceno says in this video, the first in BBC Culture’s Blue-sky Thinking series.

Tomás Saraceno: Particular Matter(s) is at The Shed, New York until 17 April.

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