“Museo Aero Solar”

The sculpture Museo Aero Solar in the Mittelhalle is a free accessible part of our exhibition “Tomás Saraceno in collaboration. Ancestral Futures”. The Museo Aero Solar is a flying museum and solar sculpture made from reused plastic bags, built collectively by people around the world. Every time the project arrives at a new location, participants collect plastic bags and add them to the sculpture. The Museo Aero Solar is not a finished artwork, but an ongoing shared process, a transnational museum of experiences and a monument to collective action.

After the current geological epoch, the Anthropocene — during which the climate has fundamentally altered due to industrialisation and mass consumption — Tomás Saraceno introduces the idea of the Aerocene, which places air at the centre: the element that all living beings share and that knows no borders. Aerocene is meant to represent an era of connection over domination that entails a different idea of progress:

“Aerocene is a proposal — a scene in, on, for, and with the air — towards a reciprocal alliance with the elements… Free from borders, free from fossil fuels, free from neocolonial extractivism.”
– Aerocene community

Aerocene raises the question how we might live differently — not by accelerating, but by learning to float. Instead of relying on fossil fuels, batteries, or extraction, aerosolar sculptures float using only sunlight and air. They rise through heat and drift with the wind, carried by the same currents that move seeds, and clouds.

In this vision, flight is no longer about control and speed. It becomes a practice of attunement and coexistence. Aerocene is not only a vision of flight, but of life — a shared movement within the fragile, interconnected system we all depend on.