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Tomás Saraceno
Living at the Bottom of the Ocean of Air (Underwater Spider), 2018

Still: Courtesy the artist

Tomás Saraceno

Collection

Abundant Futures

Single-channel video installation, black and white, sound, 8:36 min

This video work focuses on a particular type of arachnid, the diving bell spider, also called Argyroneta aquatica. This species is the only known spider that lives almost entirely underwater, including resting, catching, and eating prey, mating, egg laying, and overwintering. Found in lakes, ponds, and marshes, a diving bell spider surfaces only briefly to replenish its air supplies. Surrounding its abdomen is an air bubble secured with a few threads of silk which the spider constructs to retain its oxygen supply and which resembles a diving bell. As the oxygen content of the diving bell is depleted, the spider returns to the surface to collect more air to replenish its underwater home. Rather than separating the aqueous from the atmospheric, this floating droplet of air is a permeable membrane across which the junction of those two worlds occurs.

The title of the work refers to a reflection by seventeenth-century Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli describing life on the planet as life submerged at the “bottom of an ocean of air,” making a fundamental statement on barometric pressure and the weight of air. The hybridity of the Argyroneta aquatica which has adapted to live in extremely different environments, captures the artist’s interest in exploring possible transformations in human ways of inhabiting the planet, moving radically beyond the Anthropocene toward a shared and borderless conception of the earth. The underwater spider becomes an invitation for biospeculation. Saraceno asks, Will humans someday be able to live in and with the air?

Born in San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina, in 1973. Lives in Berlin, Germany.