ORGANIZATION NAME: Tomás Saraceno Studio
SUMMARY: This is a flying museum and a solar sculpture made by the “Museo Aero Solar” group – an open-source international community, initiated more 8 years ago by Tomás Saraceno in conversation with Alberto Pesavento, inviting everybody to take part and to turn used plastic bags to lighter-than-air sculptures – .
SOLUTION: Museo Aero Solar (2007–present) is an airborne form made solely from reused plastic bags. What began from the premise of a collection has unfolded to be an urgently necessary investigation on coexistence, aeronautics, and architecture, aimed to rethink the way we navigate new territories and venture beyond the rules of gravity. In a fascinating use of the platform of the museum, Museo Aero Solar shows how a collective project can emerge from individual acts, and potentially retake a polluting product and transform it into a mind-expanding material. The resulting collection―which includes more than 20,000 plastic bags culled from countries including Colombia, Cuba, France, Germany, Italy, Palestine, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States, among others—brings forward an insistence to grasp the sun.