Tomás Saraceno Museo Aero Solar

 

Tomás Saraceno Museo Aero Solar video here

Artist Tomás Saraceno's works often defy optical logic: they seem to hover or hang impossibly in the air, sometimes creating a space for people to walk in, other times floating above them in a gallery or museum. Saraceno is a collaborator, working with scientists, the local community and other participants to enact his mindbending installations.

This summer, one of his works hovered over a Mississauga site, daily, for 10 days during the The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (written about by our senior writer Leah Collins a few days ago). Called Museo Aero Solar, the work was made from plastic bags, collected at various sites in the city and laboriously taped together by community members with instructions provided by the artist, before the show opened. The piece, as curator Christine Shaw points out in this video by filmmakers Istoica, provokes "thinking about plastic pollution, something that we absolutely have to address worldwide." It might make you think of magic, too — or the American Beauty-esque mystery of a windswept plastic bag. Museo Aero Solar has already drifted away from Mississauga, but if you happen to be in Paris, France before January 6, 2019, you can catch Carte Blanche to Tomás Saraceno while it's taking over the Palais de Tokyo with the biggest spiderweb you've likely ever seen.