Aerocene at Nextones Festival in Italy

On July 27th and 28th Aerocene community member Lorenzo Malloni carried out a 2-day workshop: 26 Steps to be On Air during the Nextones Festival in the Val d’ Ossola, Italy.

Nextones-Festival-4
Nextones-Festival-3
Nextones-Festival-5
Nextones-Festival-2

Using inexpensive Do-It-Together techniques, the workshop’s twelve participants built two enourmous Tetro Aerosolar sculptures, that were later flown to excellent conditions. About the recent workshop, Lorenzo recalls: “We strictly followed the Aerocene sculpture construction method, including corner reinforcements and an inflation opening with velcro stripes”.

On the third day the participants were able to fly the sculptures collectively built. During the first half hour the wind was very low providing almost ideal conditions, and the sculptures took only five minutes to become buoyant. In Lorenzo’s words: “The alpine air was fresh and chill and the summer sun did the rest”.

post-nextones-1
post-nextones-2
post-nextones-4
post-nextones-5

Aerocene seeks to change how people relate to the world in environmental, social, and political terms. To build, and to design the sculpture is to engage participants in practices of thinking-through-making and collaborative action, triggering imagination and creativity, and spreading knowledge about solar balloon flights, thermodynamic physics, meteorological science and art practices through a multidisciplinary approach.⁠

Nextones project for “A Theatre of Stone in Nature” stands out as an example of architectural and landscape design which draws on the natural context and the industrial archeology of the location, thus ensuring the continuation of a narrative and enabling future generations to actively experience these spaces and also to contribute to their transformation.

Picture credits: Piercarlo Quecchia / DSL Studio

Under My Gaze

We are happy to invite the worldwide Aerocene Community, but especially those in Berlin, to the Under My Gaze aerosolar dance performance, by Renae Shadler and her collaborators together with Aerocene.

“The Sun gazes upon the Earth, creating and destroying life, the engine on which our ecosystems depend. Under my gaze is a ritual for our times, where bodies and voices pulse with the gravitational pull and combustive power of this solar giant, tracing the Sun’s movements through limb and skin, through reflection and darkness. Bodies and voices pulse with the gravitational pull and combustive power of this solar giant, tracing the Sun’s movements through limb and skin, through reflection and darkness.

Under my Gaze is a quartet performed by three people and the Aerocene sculpture that gives a body to the unseen forces that surround us: connecting Earth-bound dancers to aerial and cosmic worlds in a transforming landscape of shadowy creatures and molten forms.

The dancers explore ways to see the Sun without eyes, learning from other creatures – phototropic plants, hydra that sense light with their tentacles. The audience bears witness to this fierce and at times delicate interplay of force and form, tuning in via headphones to the rhythmic stomps and ethereal flight.

Under my Gaze proposes a new poetics of movement fuelled not by fossilised energy, but by the gaze of the Sun itself; moving with – rather than extracting from – the often invisible forces that stir and surround us.”

Previous slide
Next slide

As we learn to attune to the weather to adapt to new climates, the performance is weather dependent.

Under my Gaze
28-31. July 2022 / 11.30-12.45hr
St. Elisabeth Kirche, Invalidenstraße 4A, 10115 Berlin

The perfomance is open to everyone!
Purchasing a ticket grants you the experience of an audio soundtrack via wireless headphones.

More information: http://renaeshadler.com/undermygaze/

TEAM
Concept, Choreography, Performance: Renae Shadler | Performance: Mickey Mahar, Dorota Michalak | Composition: Samuel Hertz | Set design: Camille Lacadee | Costume design: Geraldine Arnold | Dramaturgy: Ally Bisshop, Maikon K | Production, Distribution: Dörte Wolter | Production assistant: Undine Sommers | Photos: Piotr Pietrus | Video: Camille Lacadee | Inspired by Susurrus group, 2017-2020: Samuel Hertz, Maria Nurmela, Kalle Ropponen, Renae Shadler

Presented by Renae Shadler & Collaborators in collaboration with Aerocene Foundation. Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the program NEUSTART KULTUR.

Museo Aerosolar Cátedra Goldenstein – FADU UBA

El Museo Aerosolar es una construcción espacial efímera que promueve un estado de conciencia a favor del cuidado del medio ambiente al utilizar energía natural y bolsas de plástico recicladas como material de proyecto.

Iniciado en conversaciones entre Tomás Saraceno y Alberto Pesavento en 2007, el Museo Aero Solar se desarrolla en el espacio formado entre participantes humanos y no humanos en los simples actos de cooperación y reutilización de bolsas de plástico para producir colectivamente una escultura aerosolar, capaz de moverse en el aire, utilizando sólo la energía del Sol.

Previous slide
Next slide

El MAS gira la mirada hacia el aeroceno: una nueva era geológica centrada en el cuidado de la atmósfera. Es una invitación a cambiar nuestras actitudes más dañinas hacia el planeta y de promover una sensibilidad ecológica con la posibilidad de futuros más limpios.

En el 2013 por invitación del área de educación del Parque de la Memoria, el MAS fue realizado con la cátedra Goldenstein -Proyectual (CBC FADU UBA)- por primera vez. Desde entonces cada año se realiza una nueva construcción con cientos de estudiantes trabajando unidos en un solo equipo.

Previous slide
Next slide

Agradecemos especialmente a Joaquín Ezcurra y Carlos Almeida de la comunidad Aerocene por compartirnos sus conocimientos para ampliar los límites de esta maravillosa experiencia y a nuestros queridxs Paulina Gramón Vidal y Felipe Ramírez Vilches por las bellas fotografías y el video.

Museo Aero Solar Cuarachi

Today we dive deep into the history of the Museo Aero Solar (MAS), reliving one of the most amazing MAS ever built, due to its unique and remote location in the Peruvian jungle, the harsh environmental conditions that surrounded its birth and, above all, the resilience of the community that participated in its construction. Allow us to bring the story of the Museo Aero Solar Cuarachi back to life.

In June 2014, a state oil pipeline burst in the department of Loreto, Peru, contaminating the waters of the Marañón River, on which the locals had built their livelihoods for centuries. The lack of media coverage of this ecological catastrophe left the native communities with little hope of receiving help from the government.

Artists Helga Elsner Torres and Ramiro Wong decided to take action and reached out to the well-established and active Museo Aero Solar community in Peru.

Helga and Ramiro, who knew the technique of building the tetrahedron-shaped sculpture, together with a small group of artists and activists travelled to the remote village of Cuninico. With the aim of documenting the impact of the oil spill in collaboration with the Cocama community, which was mostly affected, they took on the challenge of collectively building a Museo Aero Solar.

Helga, in dialogue with Aerocene Community, recalls the experience:
“We travelled with a good friend, Ramiro Wong, from Lima to Iquitos, and from there by boat 2 hours to Nauta. From Nauta we sailed for 12 hours in a small boat, until we finally arrived in Cuninico. There, a family welcomed us in their house and gave us food for the days we stayed working on the project. In a community that lives on natural resources like this one, after the oil spill, it was very difficult to find uncontaminated fish to eat. However, what little they could get, they shared with us. The whole village was willing to help us, they even built us a raft for the Aero Solar Museum! Cuninico, in spite of all the misfortunes it has gone through, is the place with the most beautiful landscape, close to the Pacaya Samiria National Reserve and with the most generous population I have ever met. Although due to the weather conditions, we were not able to meet the objective of documenting the disaster in the time foreseen, we decided that it would be optimal to donate these sculptures to the community. In this way, they would have another tool to document and denounce the oil spill. We would also continue to raise awareness about this news in other places.

Previous slide
Next slide

That is why Ramiro, Frances Munar Aparicio and I exhibited the experience of the Aero Solar Museum in Cuninico at the 21er Haus Museum in Vienna, Austria, together with the artist Tomás Saraceno. The people who attended the exhibition and the conference were astonished: “How is it possible that, with the utmost impunity, these disasters continue to happen? Who manages to make a solar sculpture in the middle of the Amazon?

Previous slide
Next slide

In the process of putting together an Aero Solar Museum, the remote Cocama community of Cuninico came together sharing with us the miseries of environmental pollution, but also the joy of building together an immense sculpture made of reused plastic bags on which they wrote their stories documenting the dangerous impacts the dumping had had on the surrounding ecosystem, and on their own lives.

All photographs are by Helga Elsner, whom we thank for contributing to the Aero Solar Museum story!

Museo Aero Solar Orquestando Ciudadanía

Somos efímeros

por Ángela Bonavita
Chascomús, 20 de diciembre de 2021

En septiembre empezamos a juntar, cortar y pegar bolsas de plástico en distintas instituciones de Chascomus, para lograr un gran museo Aero solar de 12 x 36metros.

Hace unos días ese Museo Aero Solar se convirtió en sala de concierto y en bastidor de niñxs, jóvenes y adultxs.

Ver la obra terminada nos invita a reflexionar sobre nuestro consumo. Cada unx de lxs que participamos en el armado aportamos una, dos o más bolsas y entre todxs juntamos (sin muchas complicaciones) las 4.000 que lo conforman.

¿Cuántas de todas esas bolsas habrán tenido más de 15 minutos de uso? ¿Cuántos negocios todavía insisten en usar plástico y cuántos otros lo cambiaron?

También nos gráfica un dato de color (bastante oscuro), este museo es el segundo más grande del mundo pero aún así, sería llenado con la basura de Chascomus que se genera solamente en TRES días.
Previous slide
Next slide
Somos efímeros, como el aire que entra y sale del globo, mutamos constantemente por el contexto o por cambios internos, como la forma del museo. Al mismo tiempo que cada unx de nosotrxs, somos parte de un todo, como cada bolsa que juntamos y reciclamos o tiramos. Pero vivimos en una sociedad tan inmersa en la rutina que pocas veces dimensionamos el impacto de nuestros actos y agarramos la bolsa del almacén o de ropa así sin mas. La mía + la tuya + la de ella…las cuatro mil.

Que lindo es usar el arte y el juego para frenar y cuestionarnos, compartir y aprender de y con tanta gente este proyecto.
El lunes una niña escribió una frase sobre la emergencia ecológica en el globo y me dió mucha certeza de que a su generación le llevaría bastantes meses más, juntar bolsas de plástico para armar su gran museo aero solar.

Maristella Svampa en Proyecto Ballena

El Antropoceno es la era del colapso. Y la palabra “colapso”, a su vez, sintetiza una realidad ilustrada por eventos extremos cada vez más frecuentes: destrucción de ecosistemas, incendios en la Amazonía, tormentas de fuego, animales sacrificados. Mientras nos acercamos a lo que podría ser el fin de la pandemia, la deuda ecológica todavía se está acrecentando. Acecha el riesgo de la parálisis de la acción, la parálisis de la imaginación política. ¿Cómo orientarnos hacia un camino post-extractivista, recalibrar nuestro lugar en el planeta e incluso en el cosmos? Las respuestas aparecen desde la militancia y el diálogo pero también desde el arte y la literatura, espacios que pueden abrir portales que señalan un horizonte utópico, un hedonismo alternativo, otras formas de vivir sobre la tierra.

Continue reading

Aerocene at OpenCOP – COP26, Glasgow, Scotland

In late 2021, the Aerocene community was invited to take part of OpenCOP, a unique co-created virtual conference that facilitated exploration, broader ecological awareness, and collective solidarities. Initiated by Forum for Earth, OpenCOP was carried out in parallel to COP26 UN Climate Change Conference that took place in Glasgow, Scotland, from November 10th to 12th, 2021.

Over a 50-hour period, discussions and performances were live-streamed, alongside videos, digital art, and projects, accessible through the state of the art Sparkle online platform, bridging projects and voices beyond those present in Glasgow to the adjacent potential of decentralized and inclusive futures

The Aerocene community set up a virtual space within the OpenCOP Imaginarium Space. The Aerocene online space at OpenCOP allowed visitors to participate on an online screening room broadcasting the Aerocene Pacha Flights live transmission, interact with the online Aerocene App and Float Predictor, and chat through video-link with other participants.

OpenCOP brought together an emerging intergenerational solidarity of earth stewards from every discipline and bio-region around the world who poured their skills, knowledge, and passions into weaving healthier, more inclusive futures, bridging their work around local and global sustainability and regeneration projects.

Activists, system hackers, thought-leaders and organizations came together to co-create this online collective envisioning and sensemaking space. You can re-live all the conversations held at OpenCOP via Forum for Earth website.

Floating above and below: Aerocene Frozen Lake, Rummelsburg, Berlin

Sunday, 14th of February 2021

Rummelsburg, Berlin, Germany

52.4946° N, 13.4800° E

TIME ON AIR: 360′

 

Aerosolar Pilots:


Lorenzo Malloni

Irina Bogdan

Thomas Charil

Alberto Vallejo

Giulia Ambrosini

Diego Alejandro Puerto Martinez

 

After a week of very low temperatures, a rare opportunity has been made possible by especially harsh winter conditions in Berlin this year: a sharp radiant sun has uncovered above the city and its frozen waterways, allowing thousands of people to walk on thick ice. 

Early in the morning, a group of six Aerosolar Pilots borrowed three Backpacks from the Aerocene Foundation and experienced a flight free from carbon emissions on top of the frozen Rummelsburg lake in Berlin. 

The vast white surface of the lake had stopped any of its motions, no water ripples, boats remaining still in their positions, as decontextualized artefacts on a deserted land. Terrestrial beings are now bashfully walking where they were not allowed to only a day before. A spontaneous situationist environment has come to life, an empty, vast stage where the public and performers merge, activating a place for renewed shared experiences. 

As soon as the black Aerosolar sculptures get inflated on the ice with only air, the power of the sun lifts them off instantaneously – amplified by the albedo reflection effect on the white, frosty lake. Immediately, their movements in the thin air generate a focal point attracting the public and participants onto the wide white stage. 

The Aerosolar Pilots share their floating experience with whoever is around, passing the fluctuating rope and initiating a bonded, bonding slow dance between humans and the solar airborne creatures.

The transitory stage hosts the first act of a participatory piece in which the sun, the winds, human and non-human are all protagonists. 

Although the stunning beauty of the three hours experience, bathed in the wintry sun, it is not easy for the aeronauts to forget that under that thick layer of ice, down to the bottom of the lake, the contamination of several decades of industrial waste has made impossible life conditions for many autochthonous species. 

As stated by the Bundesanstalt für Gewässerkunde: 

“The combination of high chemical contamination with persistent organic and inorganic chemicals, toxicity and specific substrate composition, makes a natural repopulation scenario for the improvement of the biological diversity extremely improbable”

When leaving the lake, the aeronauts’ wish is that the mirage-like white blanket that has covered it for the day, allowing for them to fly aerosolar on top of it, will be a reminder of what lies beneath it, at its very bottom, where man-generated pollutant particles have layered in-depth; that our waste does not only end up in the air that we breathe, but also in the very populated hidden underworld of our lakes, rivers and seas, all very close to us, but perhaps often forgotten merely because we can´t walk on them.

Photography by Aerocene Foundation and Tom Klingbeil, 2021, licensed under CC by Aerocene Foundation 4.0

Fly with Aerocene Pacha – Connect, BTS – Live streaming

Connect Saturday, April 25th at 3PM in Berlin, 10AM in Buenos Aires, and 10PM Seoul for a live screening of Fly with Aerocene Pacha, a project by Tomàs Saraceno for Aerocene Foundation as part of CONNECT, BTS, curated by Daehyung Lee. CONNECT, BTS is a global curatorial practice, a series of projects realized by a range of artists and curators, whose work resonates with BTS’ philosophy.

The culmination of over 20 years experimental work, Fly with Aerocene Pacha took off January 28th 2020 in the salt flats of Salinas Grandes, Argentina, becoming the first ever balloon-like structure to lift a human into the atmosphere, allowing its pilot to float free, without the use of fossil fuels, helium or lithium –becoming the most sustainable flight in human history and setting six world records across two categories.

Named after Pacha Mama, the Andean concept that connects what lies below and above the Earth’s surface with the furthest reaches of the cosmos, uniting space and time, Aerocene Pacha worked to bring together indigenous peoples and diverse communities through a common goal, raising voices in unison against harmful lithium extraction practices in northern Argentina.

Now, screen Pacha’s journey through films commissioned from Gastón Solnicki, Maximiliano Laina, Julia Solomonoff for Canal Encuentro, and Diego Belaunzarán Colombo and Matías Arturo Tarrés.

Be lifted by the sun and carried by the wind in your own virtual aerosolar sculpture by downloading the Aerocene App. Within the app is the Float Predictor, a global forecasting system that predicts flight paths of lighter than air sculptures circling around the globe free from CO2 emissions, which was developed by the Aerocene Foundation in collaboration with MIT.

Air pollution is intrinsically linked with the COVID crisis -one of the biggest obstacles in recovery from the disease being a person’s lung health. Let’s begin an era free from fossil fuels, lithium and other pollutants, together, as we experience the flight of Pacha from our homes. Join the Aerocene era and follow future flights @aerocene!