Tomás Saraceno is inaugurating a work at Haus der Kunst that the institution will never own. Tomás Saraceno in collaboration. Ancestral Futures, on view at Haus der Kunst in Munich through 7 February 2027, brings together two decades of research into air, webs, and interspecies communication, while unveiling a permanent land art commission co-developed with Indigenous communities in northern Argentina — one whose future, by design, belongs to them and not to the museum that helped build it. The result is less an exhibition of finished objects than a working demonstration of what it means to curate relationships rather than things.
Two decades, two strands. The show is structured around the two long-running bodies of research that have defined Saraceno’s practice since the mid-2010s: the Aerocene Foundation, his interdisciplinary community devoted to fossil-fuel-free flight, and Arachnophilia, his ongoing dialogue with spiders, diviners, scientists, and philosophers around spider/web architectures. Aerocene sculptures move using only air, solar radiation, and infrared energy; in 2020, the balloon flight of Aerocene Pacha across Salinas Grandes, Argentina, set thirty-two world records, becoming the most sustainable flight in human history. Arachnophilia, meanwhile, treats the spider’s web not as metaphor but as a working sensory and structural system — one the exhibition asks visitors to inhabit rather than simply observe.
A permanent commission. The exhibition’s central event is the unveiling of El Santuario del Agua (The Sanctuary of Water), a new permanent work of land art conceived by Saraceno following a direct request from the Indigenous communities of Salinas Grandes. Co-developed with the Aerocene Foundation, Studio Tomás Saraceno, Haus der Kunst, and the eleven Indigenous communities of Red Atacama, its interconnected forms “appear to grow from the landscape, as if absorbing and expanding the natural formation of salt crystals,” says artistic director Andrea Lissoni — a structure that is at once sculpture, ecological advocacy tool, and territorial claim.
Governance, not gesture. What distinguishes the project from the familiar language of institutional “collaboration” is its refusal of ownership. “The Sanctuary of Water takes form through assemblies and collective decision-making. Its future belongs to those who imagined it together,” says Lissoni. The museum describes itself as contributing to a structure that remains in the hands of the communities who developed it, its centre of gravity remaining, as Lissoni puts it, where the knowledge originates: with the communities of the Salinas Grandes.
An accidental origin. The show’s genealogy runs through an unlikely detail: the local spiders of Haus der Kunst’s own building. During the preparation of Fujiko Nakaya’s 2023 exhibition Nebel Leben, the team searching for spiders living in the museum — needed for the historic installation Ride a Wind and Draw a Line (1973) — began a conversation with Saraceno about webs, vibration, and permeability that would eventually expand into “Ancestral Futures.” The fog that Nakaya let drift out through the building’s open doors, connecting the galleries to the Eisbach and the Englischer Garten beyond, becomes in retrospect a rehearsal for the porousness Saraceno’s project now pushes further.
Vibration over sight. That porousness finds its clearest architectural expression in Algo-r(h)i(y)thms (2019), installed in the same gallery where Nakaya’s fog once dissolved the line between architecture and landscape. Developed through long-term exchanges with bioacoustics and animal-behaviour researchers, the installation invites visitors to move through a network of suspended ropes that functions as a vibrational environment — a physical translation of how spiders perceive the world not through vision but through oscillations travelling across a web. “What can be sensed when we shift our attention from individual entities to the relationships that sustain them?” says Lissoni of the question the installation poses.
Knowledge as architecture. “Ancestral Futures” also experiments with a different exhibition syntax, interspersing artworks with rooms devoted entirely to knowledge — scientific research, Indigenous knowledge, environmental testimony — given the same spatial weight as the artworks themselves. These rooms “do not provide background information or educational supplements, but function instead as interpretative chambers, with galleries functioning as extended wall texts,” says Lissoni: a room encountered late in the visit can retroactively shift the meaning of a gallery seen an hour earlier.
An institution as programme. The ambition extends beyond this single show. “Haus der Kunst works with living artists to draw new lines in art history and to rethink how exhibitions are experienced today. With Saraceno, the building becomes a space to engage with ecological and social questions that extend beyond the exhibition itself,” says Lissoni.
Building as public infrastructure. The project sits deliberately within Munich’s own architectural history. Lissoni draws a direct line to Frei Otto’s Olympiapark (1972), designed in explicit opposition to the monumental architecture of National Socialist power and inspired, notably, by cable networks, soap films, and spider webs. Otto’s transparent canopies proposed openness as a social principle rather than a formal one — privileging circulation over control, encounter over representation. Saraceno’s own webs and aerosolar structures extend that same proposition under different ecological and political conditions, more than fifty years later.
Participation as authorship. The Mittelhalle, meanwhile, continues its recent evolution — through past projects by Christine Sun Kim, Martino Gamper, and Ei Arakawa-Nash — into a genuinely shared production space. Museo Aero Solar, both sculpture and flying museum, is built from plastic bags glued together by visitors over many years, each new iteration altering its form and meaning through the hands that contribute to it. Starting in September 2026, the museum’s Open Atelier becomes its dedicated workspace, where bags collected during the run of “Ancestral Futures” are folded into the sculpture’s next expansion — an artwork whose authorship is structurally distributed rather than symbolically shared.
A learning programme built in. The exhibition is accompanied by a substantial Learning and Engagement schedule developed with the Aerocene Foundation, including a round table on 17 July with representatives of the Red Atacama network — Miguel Casimiro, Iván Arjona Acoria, and Luisa Casimiro — alongside human rights and environmental justice activist Gastón Chillier and artist-curator Andrei Fernández, addressing the struggle for water in the Salinas Grandes and the pressure of international mining corporations on the region. A parallel series of guided walks, developed with the Max Planck Society, pairs visitors with researchers such as Prof. Dr. Peter Fratzl on spider silk and Dr. Franziska Glassmeier on clouds and climate, taking the conversation out of the museum and into Munich’s Englischer Garten.
A thread, followed. What stays with the visitor, in the end, is not a single sculpture but a working method: the way a chance encounter with local wildlife — spiders found while preparing someone else’s exhibition — was allowed to grow, uninterrupted, into a permanent, community-governed monument on another continent. Few museums would let that kind of accident dictate the terms of a co-commission; “Ancestral Futures” treats the patience behind it as the whole point.
Tomás Saraceno in collaboration. Ancestral Futures by Tomás Saraceno | Where: Haus der Kunst, Prinzregentenstraße 1, 80538 Munich — When: 17 July 2026 – 7 February 2027
Also on view this season: Haus der Kunst’s own trajectory of atmospheric and collective practice — Fujiko Nakaya’s fog work is now showing in Paris at the Bourse de Commerce, on view through 14 September — sits alongside a wider season of installations working with light, land, and memory: James Turrell’s newly opened permanent Skyspace at ARoS Aarhus, Leandro Erlich’s retrospective at the Grand Palais, running through 6 September, Cartier and Studio Sabine Marcelis at NGV Melbourne, open until 4 October, and Joshua Vides at the Petersen Automotive Museum, on view into next year. Saraceno himself last appeared on urdesign in 2020, with his moving-atmosphere installation at the Garage Museum in Moscow.