One of the most exciting places for contemporary art in Berlin is the Hamburger Bahnhof. The History of this luminous hall, a former train-station, goes back to the 19th century and has not stopped making History ever since. Though with a different kind of vehicle.
The airy hall is currently populated by “Cloud Cities” an expansive installation by Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno. His bubbly landscape looks like a constructing-plan for a galactic utopia. The “clouds” are different-sized spheres, transparent balloons a perly breeze that can be touched and inhabited. Some of the clouds are covered with plants like flying gardens, other filled with water. Those little planets orbit through the hall, attached with black strings, which allow them to float across the web cocooned by their fellows.
Saraceno studied architecture, which may be little surprising, but still greatly impressive when standing amidst this structural design, drafted for his futuristic map. One feels like catapulted to another hemisphere, a place where the concept of living-space and environment are conceived in a complete new way. Cities oscillate like habitable cells. The visitors can climb into the clouds, accessing them via a ladder and once the height is scaled, one can lie on transparent, mellow sheets – feeling as though mere light was carrying the weight of your floating body.
A cloud is space and non-space at the same time. A cloud is neither reachable on earth nor in the skies. A poem by Bertolt Brechts reads: “And over us in the fair sky of the summer / There was a cloud on which I gazed for long / It was so very white and so immensely lofty / And when I looked up, it was gone.“
One can read Saracenos lofty installation as challenge on how to encounter our environmental issues. How to deal with the sustainability of our planet. How mankind moves and expands. Or you just lie down on one of his Spacebubbles, until all thoughts and compact borders disappear. Because that´s also what clouds are: an utopic non-place, without duration, without definite limits and ultimate restrictions…. And hereby they equal us humans more, than we may think.
Copyright: Installation views from the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2011 and Tomás Saraceno Cloud Cities, 2011 Installationsansicht Hamburger Bahnhof
Poem translation: http://partyofone.typepad.com/poemarium/2008/05/bertolt-brecht.html
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