‘Web(s) of Life’: An evolutionary tapestry at Serpentine Gallery

Urgency breeds art, as art enables the spirit to garner agency—both individual and collective. In the face of our ongoing climate crisis, art institutions have seen various forms of protest by climate activists. This summer, one of the prevailing art institutions, Serpentine Gallery, situated in the heart of London’s Kensington Gardens, opened Web(s) of Life. The exhibition is convinced as a living organism. The inception of such an exhibition elicits the question of whether the urgency of the climate crisis has encouraged art institutions to adopt biomimicry as an intervening art practice.

Biomimicry is understood as the extraction of ideas, principles, and processes from nature. With the exhibition Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Web(s) of Life, the gallery transforms into a veritable biosphere brought together by works of Tomas Saraceno—an Argentinian multimedia artist. For over 20 years, Saraceno’s oeuvre has acknowledged and made tangible the intricate, complex, and interdependent demographics that together form an ecosystem; inclusive of humans, animals, plants, and any form of living matter. Saraceno’s artist studio in Berlin acts as an experimental and interdisciplinary space, and a spatially enclosed intersection of research-based, environmentally social consciousness, art, architecture, and design practice, also promoting community-led initiatives.

Saraceno's introduction in the exhibition's official guide, is perhaps the best introduction to the audience. In it he explains, “This exhibition is alive, it sleeps and breathes, overheats, and quiets down, and asks us to follow. For its duration, the Serpentine is wholly reliant on solar sculpture power from panels newly installed on the roof. With energy scarce, the AC will be off, triggering the performance for both visitors and staff. The ability to swing with these rhythms is part of the performance! When heat waves descend, we might be closed as the galleries are uncomfortably hot. Walk slower, and, if clouds appear like rocks and towers, the sky refreshes with frequent showers, the video projector might lack voltage so come back another time. Reject false solutions and new forms of energy colonialism advancing in the name of a green transition, we can produce enough social energy to change the power systems. we do not all breathe the same air, and yet the air is unconditional to all. be part of the living web(s) of life.”

A liminal experience invites the audience under the installation The Birds Will Keep Calling You where the visitor is expected to renounce their phones; as a barter, the visitor receives an artwork. This ritual is to stimulate the audience's engagement in a real temporal setting and to break away from our naturalised electronic lifestyle.

An intangible yet omnipresent performative artwork, Ballad of Weather Dependency, is an intervention within the Serpentine Gallery’s infrastructure. The entirety of the exhibition is powered by the energy generated by solar panels on the roof, and the weather predicts the art gallery’s ecosystem and options for conducting operations. Furthermore, the doors are gaped during the exhibition, to invite other life forms to the gallery’s biosphere. The equipment to control temperature and humidity is to be turned off, maintaining natural ventilation.

Venturing further into the darkness of the gallery space, the viewer can spot World(ing)WideWeb(s).Life, a work featuring intricate, lustrous, thread-like tendrils woven into a sculptural installation of spider webs anchored by guy lines that were woven in Saraceno’s Berlin studio. The web installation is not shielded by glass and gives the opportunity to visitors to perceive the weight of air, even that of one’s breath, on the delicate threads. Ironically, the lack of a protective facade around the artwork also draws upon the spirit of the debate, on the preservation of the natural versus man-made.

To magnify the ingenuity of spiders, an installation of a confessional booth holds the space signifying the intention to commune with the energy of the arachnid species. Visitors are allowed to sit in the repurposed confessional box, allowing them a shrine-like view of the spider webs. Spiders, known to have poor sight and hearing, this experience is incorporated into the installation with occasional tremors in the confessional chamber. Visitors can practice Ngam Du, an intergenerational ritual performed by a community of spider diviners from Somié, Cameroon, to ask binary questions to a ground-dwelling spider who will answer by rearranging a set of cards. For Saraceno, this practice is to emphasise bioindicators, which refer to living organisms’ sensibilities to respond to changes in the environment such as pollution, ecological well-being, weather etc.

In another room, a film installation titled Fly with Pacha, Into the Aerocene plays, and the film narrates the story of indigenous communities of Jujuy in Argentina—who are resiliently trying to safeguard land and water resources, which are under the threat from steady mining for lithium, which is used in all battery products. In addition to the film, one will notice a flotilla of black balloons that are driven by solar energy to sail across the white salt flats of Jujuy. These balloons are sculptures in their own right, and just another of Saraceno's attempts to "levitate without any violence to the earth," as he puts it. In 2020, he made a flight that shattered 32 world records and was the longest fossil-free flight to be recorded.

On the seamless exteriors of the gallery’s biosphere, a sculptural installation titled Cloud Cities offers interspecies an opportunity in the structure of the gallery space to practice cohabitations. These structures are placed on the exterior architecture of the gallery. The notion for this installation is to raise awareness of the depleting population of wildlife in urban landscapes.

The exhibition also allows visitors to imagine and experience the circularity of our power consumption through an installation comprising cycles that must be pedalled to listen to the Manifesto for an Ecosocial Energy Transition from the Peoples of the South. The audio prompts toward a new form of colonialism—energy colonialism which prevails under the false pretence of green transition, with incomplete solutions. Web(s) of Life imitates nature to intervene in human inaction towards climate change. The exhibition itself exists as a life form, a microcosm of an ideal, climate-conscious world.