This show may be predictive of what many will be like in the future. It relies entirely on solar power , so some works will look different or not function fully during cloudy weather. In heatwaves, the gallery will effectively shut, because the climate control system has been turned off (one wonders how elastically the Serpentine may come to judge what constitutes a heatwave).
The exhibition’s functionality, or potential lack thereof, is as much part of the Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno’s overall concept as anything you can see or experience here. This is an avowedly post-anthropocentric exhibition, one that foregrounds interspecies coexistence and communication, positions us in an interconnected global ecosystem and seeks to separate us from convenient modern trappings.
It begins outside the Serpentine Gallery, as sculptures form in prismic clusters on the exterior of the building. Bird boxes, bee hotels, squirrel huts are realised in Saraceno’s trademark multisided modules – “geodesic” is the architectural term. These Cloud Cities, as Saraceno calls them are expanded on inside, in what’s technically the last room, if you come in through the conventional gallery entrance.
But many won’t – because the doors to the Serpentine’s westernmost space will be opened onto Kensington Gardens during opening hours. And to visitors of all species. Saraceno is actively welcoming critters, from domestic pets (canvases attract dogs to make their marks) to wild hedgehogs, birds and bees to inhabit his creations. Off this gallery is a small space only accessible through a dog-shaped hole to children, who can make drawings based on cloud formations, like the ones that paper the walls. The animals and children are among the many who enact the “collaboration” in Saraceno’s title.
Saraceno’s abiding zoological fascination though is with spiders. And while his marvellous web-like creations are absent here, we do get the real thing, in all their beauty and miraculous ingenuity – silk webs on metal frames or branches, grown in his Berlin studio, and strongly lit to emphasise their strength and delicacy. Meanwhile, a film focuses on the Mambila community in Somié, Cameroon, which practises spider divination.
Matching his own arachnophilia is one of the challenges Saraceno sets his audience. And the show requires other forms of receptivity. If you do enter through the main entrance, you’re asked to hand over your phone; Saraceno argues that it’s “high time some of us change our habits and not the climate”. And this, the central message in everything from the whimsical sculptures to the Cameroon video, is tied together in an hour-long documentary film, Fly with Pacha, Into the Aerocene.
Here, Saraceno focuses on the indigenous community in Salinas Grandes, Argentina, whose salt-flat environment is threatened by the mining of lithium (chemical symbol Li). This is the alkali metal or “mineral intelligence” personified in part of the film, which is at the core of mobile phones and electric cars, among much else.
The mining of lithium is depriving the community of water – which is why the embodied Li tells us she is “the neocolonial avatar of a science without conscience”. Saraceno and his collaborators capture the community’s resistance but also document a project by Saraceno and his Aerocene group to create the most sustainable human flight in history, with a balloon powered only by the sun and the wind. It broke 32 world records. The film is the best thing here, with two particularly powerful moments – an excoriating, stirring speech by the Argentine sociologist Maristella Svampa and the suitably uplifting moment the balloon begins its landmark flight.
Part of its effectiveness is in the palpable anger and injustice you feel in the people whose voices it amplifies. Much else here, for all its laudable subject matter and ambition, lacks a similarly convincing impact. Interesting and necessary thinking abounds, but that doesn’t always translate into effective art.
