Tomas Saraceno he has spent much of his career testing the limits of what a work of art can hold. Air currents, cobwebs, solar heat, indigenous knowledge, political struggle and architectural speculation all enter his practice without settling into a single discipline. At House of Artthese strands converge inside Ancestral Futureshis most ambitious exhibition to date, running until February 7, 2027.
Scale matters, but not for the usual reason. Saraceno does not use the museum as a container for monumental objects. It turns the building into a field of relationships. Air-powered sculptures, communal habitats, web structures, acoustic systems and spatial interventions alter the galleries from within, asking visitors to understand the space as something collectively produced by bodies, materials, climates and species.
The exhibition brings together two of Saraceno’s central bodies of research, Aerocene and Arachnophilia, while presenting The Sanctuary of Water, a permanent land art project developed with the eleven indigenous communities of the Red Atacama network in Salinas Grandes, northern Argentina.
This new commission gives the exhibition its political and moral center. Designed in close collaboration with communities defending ancestral lands, The Sanctuary of Water places issues of extraction, sovereignty and ecological survival within the museum without reducing them to representation. Saraceno’s role here is less that of a writer imposing the form than a participant helping to create a platform through which local knowledge, environmental urgency, and collective resistance can be made visible.
This distinction is crucial. Contemporary art often turns the ecological crisis into images. Saraceno instead strives to create systems that remain active beyond the exhibition. His work has a utopian overtone, yet it also insists on infrastructure, research and participation. The profit dimension is never completely separated from practice.
This tension has long defined Aerocene, the interdisciplinary community Saraceno launched in 2015. His solar-powered sculptures imagine forms of movement independent of fossil fuels, using air, heat and radiation as a basis for flight. The project reached a turning point in 2020 when Aerocene Pacha completed a record flight in Argentina powered entirely by natural atmospheric forces.
At Haus der Kunst, these works function as proposals rather than displays of technological mastery. They ask what forms of mobility become possible when speed, extraction and combustion no longer define progress. Their apparent lightness poses a serious critique of the systems that organize modern life.
If Aerocene looks upward, Arachnophilia turns attention to forms of intelligence that already exist around us. Saraceno’s long engagement with cobwebs treats them as architecture, instrument, communication network and record of movement. In works like Towards the Sanctuary of Water, these structures become models for thinking about interdependence without hierarchy.
The web is an obvious metaphor for connectivity, but Saraceno’s interest goes further. It studies how tissues absorb vibrations, adapt to pressure and distribute tension. Their intelligence lies in the response, not the control. This makes them particularly relevant to a practice concerned with ecological systems, where stability depends on continuous adaptation.
The exhibition’s title, Ancestral Futures, belies the familiar opposition between tradition and innovation. Saraceno suggests that the future may depend less on invention than on the recovery of forms of knowledge that modernity has marginalized. Indigenous stewardship, non-human intelligence, atmospheric awareness and collective action appear here as modern resources, not vestiges of the past.
This approach can easily slip into abstraction, and Saraceno’s work has sometimes risked allowing its visual seduction to blunt the urgency of its politics. At Haus der Kunst, the challenge is whether immersive environments can sustain the challenging environments they invoke. The success of the exhibition will depend on how clearly it preserves the action of the communities, organizations and systems it presents.
Edited by Sarah Johanna Theurer and Andrea Lissonithe project also extends to learning programs, performances and public meetings developed with the Aerocene Foundation. This broader structure suits Saraceno’s practice, which has always operated through networks rather than individual projects.
Ancestral Futures is finally asking the museum to behave differently. Instead of presenting ecology as a theme, it treats the exhibition itself as an ecosystem. Visitors enter a space where air, movement, sound, material and knowledge remain in constant relationship.
Saraceno does not offer a coherent picture of the future. It offers conditions to imagine. This distinction gives the exhibition its power. The future here is neither distant nor purely technological. It is already present in the atmosphere, the web, the earth, and the forms of knowledge we continue to overlook.
