On the occasion of his carte blanche at the Palais de Tokyo (from 17 October 2018 to 6 January 2019), the artist Tomás Saraceno is the guest editor-in-chief of issue 28 of the magazine Palais.
Tomás Saraceno transforms the Palais de Tokyo into a uniquely sensory experience, a vast “cosmic jam session.” His exhibition “ON AIR” is imagined as an ecosystem in becoming; hosting a polyphonic choreography between human and non-human universes, where works reveal common, fragile and ephemeral rythms and trajectories uniting these worlds. It's about celebrating an interconnected culture, new modes of knowledge production, to open itself up to the debate and global challenges posed by the Anthropocene, an era where some human activities leave an impact so important that they profoundly modify terrestrial ecosystem.
Reflecting Tomás Saraceno's artistic practice and echoing his exhibition, this issue of
Palais magazine brings together a large variety of original contributions from philosophers, researchers, scientists, writers, curators, historians and theoreticians.
With : an interview of Tomás Saraceno by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, curator of the exhibition; texts by
Benjamin H. Bratton, Vinciane Despret, Anselm Franke, Stavros Katsanevas,
Brandon LaBelle, Bruno Latour, Megan Prelinger, João Ribas, Mark Wigley and
Estelle Zhong Mengual; the voices of Albert-László Barabási,
Robert Barry, Markus J. Buehler, Luca Cerizza, Tim Choy, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Sasha Engelmann, Milovan Farronato, David Haskell, Jens Hauser, Peggy S. M. Hill, Caroline A. Jones, Leila W. Kinney, Eben Kirksey, Jonathan M. Ledgard, Sofia Lemos, Michael Marder, Derek McCormack, Roland Mühlethaler,
Jussi Parikka, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Filipa Ramos, Nicholas Shapiro, Étienne Turpin and Philip Ursprung; as well as a large selection of images of Tomás Saraceno's work.
Published twice a year,
Palais magazine (
P L S since 2023) offers an in-depth perspective on the exhibitions and program of the
Palais de Tokyo.
Palais allows people to see contemporary art in a topical way, as often as possible from the point of view of the artists themselves. Each issue of the magazine includes dossiers, interviews, essays, special projects and inserts, all contributed by artists, art critics, historians or theorists, making
Palais magazine an essential tool for apprehending contemporary art.
Tomás Saraceno's (born 1973 in San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina, lives and works in Berlin) oeuvre could be seen as an ongoing research, informed by the worlds of art,
architecture,
natural sciences, astrophysics and engineering; his floating sculptures, community projects and interactive installations propose and explore new, sustainable ways of inhabiting and sensing the
environment.
Aerocene, an open-source community project for artistic and scientific exploration initiated from Saraceno's vision, becomes buoyant only by the heat of the Sun and infrared radiation from the surface of Earth.
In 2015, Saraceno achieved the world record for the first and longest certified fully-solar manned flight. During the past decade, he has initiated collaborations with renowned scientific institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Max Planck Institute, the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, and the Natural History Museum London.
He was the first person to scan, reconstruct and reimagine spiders' weaved spatial habitats, and possesses the only three-dimensional spider web collection to existence.
