Performance filmed and photographed on 11 December 2011 on the occasion of the opening of Belfort – Montbéliard TGV station and TGV Rhine Rhone.
Flying sphere: tensile PVC structure, ropes, solar panels, electrical wiring, light sensors, LED, helium, containing several embedded video and photo cameras; video (15 minutes) and 6 photographs, variable dimensions © Studio Tomas Saraceno, Frankfurt
Tomas Saraceno
Born in 1973 in Tucuman, Argentina, lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany.
First look
Argentine architect and artist Tomas Saraceno invents Cloud City and here makes his first public performance in France, with a prototype balloon of nearly seven meters in diameter, around a heart that works with solar energy: Solar net. After a static one, presented in Harvard (USA) during spring 2011, this prototype flew on December 11, 2011 in the sky of Belfort-Montbéliard, producing video and photos exhibited in the station.
Second look
Saraceno today gives the dream of Icare an urban and social dimension: “Up in the sky, there will be this cloud, an habitable platform floating in the air, changing shape and joining other platforms as a cloud could do. It flies through the atmosphere, driven by winds, trying to regulate (social) temperatures and differences in (political) pressure. “(Tomas Saraceno, Calder workshop, Saché, spring 2010)
Look at history
This performance of the artist is a beautiful metaphor of the stakes carried by the Energy Valley in Franche-Comté. It is also in the footsteps of Étienne Oehmichen, a pioneer in biomechanics and the first in the world to fly an helicopter, stabilized by a Zodiac balloon, in Valentigney, 1921, just a few kilometers from the new TGV station !
Look at our society
Tomas Saraceno brings us to the idea of a new mobile, sustainable and social dwelling that knows no boundaries, posing essential questions about the future of our cities on the art scene.
With the support of :
