NEW TAIPEI CITY.- In Interwoven, Tomás Saraceno’s first large-scale solo exhibition in Taiwan, audiences are invited to attune with and learn from the web(s) of life—together with the air, spiders, clouds, spores, seeds, black matter, particulate matter of soot and pollution, and the cosmos. Visitors will encounter immersive installations where spider/web architectures and flying museums of re-used materials become vehicles to imagine a multiplicity of futures, and witness the artist's long-standing collaboration with the Indigenous Communities of Salinas Grandes in northern Argentina.
This collaboration is rooted in ecosocial justice, learning from ancestral knowledges and resisting the socio-political and economic structures that underlie ecological crises and extractive dynamics between the global majority and the global minority. In doing so, sustainability is no longer treated as an abstract ideal, but as a shared challenge of coexistence that must be continually questioned, reflected upon, and practiced.
In the 1970s, environmental movements emerged with a strong redemptive character, framing “nature” as an object in need of protection and repair, and sought to return the world to a pre-industrial state of purity. Entering the twenty-first century, however, scholars in the humanities and social sciences introduced the concept of the Anthropocene, arguing that humans are no longer merely influencing the environment but have become a geological force transforming the Earth itself. Climate, oceans, land, and life are now deeply entangled with human history and action. Environmental issues, therefore, have shifted from concerns of prevention and repair toward a more fundamental inquiry: when we can no longer return to an unspoiled world, how might we coexist with this world and other forms of life?
Others argue that the current era should instead be referred to as the Capitalocene, a term that defines the current geological epoch not by the impact of humanity as a whole, but by the specific, profound influence of the capitalist economic system on the Earth's environment, driving the climate crisis, mass extinctions, and pollution through its relentless need for profit, growth, and resource exploitation. Such critique challenges the assumption of a “pristine nature”, a view that has long silenced Indigenous voices and worldviews, in which humans and nature were never separate, but always entangled in relations of mutual interdependence.
Throughout the exhibition, visitors move between microscopic and planetary scales—from the spatial-cognitive capacities of spiders to the thermodynamic play of the atmosphere—encountering the invisible threads that entangle a shared existence. Saraceno’s practice proposes a shift in perspective: from capitalocentric to Aero(s)cenic, a state of attunement and way of understanding the world that centers the atmosphere and all its interwoven beings, both living and non-living.
The exhibition invites visitors to enter a relational space where art, sensory experience and collective imagination come together, asking us to contemplate how we interact with the world, with other forms of life, and with matter itself. It encourages reflection on how each action and “response-ability” may shape the future of the Earth, inviting us to draw from different forms of knowledge, towards more just and eco-social forms of planetary coexistence.
