Tomás Saraceno. Moving Atmospheres

Participants of the workshop will be transported to the year 3030 and make a postcard for a real person from the past, that is, from 2020. Inspired by the work of Tomás Saraceno, ideas about an eco-friendly future, and their own thoughts on what the world could be like in a thousand years, they will also try to envision and depict a panorama of a floating city.  

In addition to developing the city’s new image, the group will discuss why certain buildings will soar in the air, which architectural principles will most likely become outdated and which will remain relevant. They will try to find answers to questions about how future city dwellers will look and what kind of interaction with other types of life awaits humanity. Participants will also design a postage stamp, a teleport to the past in this case.

Anthropologist Denis Sivkov will talk about techno-utopian flight projects and amateur aeronautics.

Nature is an inexhaustible source of ideas, concepts, and solutions. Constant experiments have been going on in its “laboratories” for 3.8 billion years now. Through countless trial and error in the course of evolution, modern plant and animal species have emerged and occupied all ecological niches on the planet, from sea depths to mountain peaks, from the Equator to Polar caps. Human genius has also managed to achieve a lot, but nature often does it with much more elegance and cost savings. Humanity was able to elevate themselves to the sky, but only due to the use of hydrocarbon engines. To lift just one kilogram of mass in the air, an airplane requires immeasurably more energy than those who mastered flight millions of years ago, that is, birds, insects, and even some mammals.

The speakers will discuss biomimicry, biomemetics, and bionics—areas of knowledge based on borrowing ideas, concepts, design, and technical solutions from natural processes and organisms. The audience will get to know which plant gave us velcro straps, which bird inspired Japanese bullet trains, how physical laws can allow humans to overcome gravity and conquer the atmosphere, and whether this will be the beginning of a new era—the Aerocene.

The workshop will introduce participants to Tomás Saraceno’s Aerocene Manifesto and the bold ideas of Russian avant-gardists. After that, they will be offered the opportunity to design the landscape of a floating city. Each group member will create their own block, which could exist autonomously or be connected to other neighborhoods. Helped by the Museum’s educators, participants will figure out how the city with a three-dimensional traffic diagram, with street blocks and city centers located at different heights—could operate, with particular focus made on the newly-developed air transport.

Sociologist Lilia Zemnukhova will speak about concepts of new worlds, alternative in relation to the Anthropocene, as well as social relationships therein.

Architect Nerea Calvillo will speak about different ways of sensing the environment from the perspective of feminist and queer research.

The public program will demonstrate how Tomás Saraceno's practice is connected to philosophy and the utopian ideas about the future of humanity in the air environment.The reading group participants will get introduced to texts by Tomás Saraceno and like-minded authors dedicated to the Aerocene concept. The texts will be scrutinized from the viewpoints of science, technology, contemporary philosophy, and art.

Philosopher Eugene Kuchinov will speak about panpsychism in connection with the ideas of the early twentieth-century Russian cosmists Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Nikolai Fedorov, and the Gordin brothers.

Tomás Saraceno’s talk will focus on the history of the interdisciplinary community known as Aerocene and his other projects devoted to the exploration of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Curator and architecture historian Aleksandra Selivanova will speak about the projects for the conquest of the sky and outer space proposed by the Soviet Avant-Garde.