Airplanes have so many problems: airports and gate agents and straight seatbacks for take-offs and landings. Not to mention jet fuel. Imagine, instead, jumping on a giant plastic pillow and floating serenely across, say, the English Channel.

Tomas Saraceno hasn’t yet actually piloted one of his floating worlds, but he has climbed aboard and looked down at the ground below. For his first solo show, in 2004 at Pinksummer in Genoa, he created a small airborne utopia using sheets of plastic and string. Images from the gallery’s opening depict the artist peering down at the gallery’s marble floor several meters below...in socks. Visitors were invited to climb a ladder and make their own nests in the soft, air-filled plastic.

The 34-year-old Frankfurt-based Argentine artist envisions entire elevated cities, interconnected warrens of solar-powered hot air balloons drifting across the skies. “This time is a critical moment for the people living on this planet, because of climate change,” says Saraceno, in his lilting, grammar-defying English. The cities would be transnational, inclusive, mobile, and green.

“Air-Port-City” is Saraceno’s dream of interconnected balloons, held aloft by converted solar energy and made mobile by the wind. On the way to realizing the dream, he has constructed “Flying Gardens”—stone and Spanish moss hanging from interlocking plastic balloons that look as if they were blown by a Titan—and, at the 2006 Sao Paolo Biennial, an elaborate installation titled “How to Live Together,” consisting of three giant stacked balloons through which people could carefully clamber. (His first U.S. museum show runs Nov. 18 to Feb. 17, 2008 at the Berkeley Art Museum.)

Plants and people mingled in a PVC biosphere held up by corded ribbons this fall at Saraceno’s second show at Pinksummer. Aloft on his clear floating pillows of air, Saraceno says, “People might think a little about their interaction with this planet—it might stimulate people to perceive.”

He sounds like the Italian comic Roberto Benigni, full of whimsical but deep thoughts. His family moved to Italy when he was still a toddler. His father felt the new military government might not be sympathetic to his vaguely left-wing work as a comparative agriculturalist. The family moved back to Argentina in the 80s, when the government changed, then Saraceno migrated to Europe as an adult. “When people ask me where I am from, I say, from the planet Earth.”

As fanciful as Saraceno’s utopian installations sound, they are actually grounded in solid engineering. Saraceno studied architecture in Buenos Aires and works with the Frankfurt engineering firm Bollinger + Grohmann, which has constructed museums and theaters from St. Petersburg to Riyadh. With B+G, Saraceno has applied for two patents on his solar balloons. For this fall’s Liverpool Biennial, he plans to work with a large balloon manufacturer to construct his biggest airborne pillow yet, 20 meters in diameter.

To design his balloons, Saraceno says, he looks to the clouds. “The clouds, you never see the same shape anywhere else, only in this place [his installation], because it is so much about where the water evaporates and condensates.” Then he brings together materials in his studio and maps out the constituent parts; the actual plastic sphere may be produced by a company in China or Argentina, the air compressor originates from Germany.

Although they’re pillows, climbing into them requires some communitarian spirit—not to mention, the signing of a waiver. “Because you are on a pillow, if you jump in one corner, the one next to you will move or fall down,” Saraceno explains. “Every time someone enters the lower stairs, the people on top modify the position, so it is a space very much connected. It demands a lot of responsibility from the people toward the environment through which they are moving.” —Sarah H. Bayliss

www.tanyabonakdargallery.com

MORE DIGITALL HEROES