Tomás Saraceno in collaboration: Ancestral Futures

“When the Llama Drinks from the Stars and the Spider Weaves Cycles of Life, Where the Sky Touches the Earth and Time Grows Like Salt, The Sanctuary of Water reflects Fair Clouds on the Horizon.”

In a call for environmental justice, Tomás Saraceno works with human and non-human communities living in endangered environments to renew our relationships with the Earth, water, air, and the cosmos. 

Ancestral Futures follows in the steps of the Indigenous Brazilian philosopher Ailton Krenak: The future is nothing we need to invent—it is already here, woven into the landscape like a river. Through his works, Tomás Saraceno reveals the intricate connections between people and ecosystems that sustain life.

The exhibition premieres the project The Sanctuary of Water (2026), a permanent sculpture situated in northern Argentina, conceived by the artist and made as a direct response to the request of Indigenous Communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc. Its building process is documented in the publication accompanying the exhibition. The book can be ordered here.

The exhibition continues a wider conversation at Haus der Kunst shaped by Fujiko Nakaya’s fog environments (2022) and Philippe Parreno’s El Almendral (2024) where landscape, atmosphere, and elemental forces emerge as living and interconnected systems. Like Nakaya’s fog drifting toward the Eisbach and the Englischer Garten, Saraceno opens the building toward the surrounding landscape, dissolving boundaries between inside and outside, human and more-than-human worlds.

The exhibition Ancestral Futures is curated by Sarah Johanna Theurer and Andrea Lissoni.

The exhibition is generously supported by Sergio Linhares and Stefan Vilsmeier. Brainlab is exhibition partner for “Tomás Saraceno in collaboration. Ancestral Futures“. The Sanctuary of Water is being developed in collaboration with Red Atacama and the Aerocene Foundation. 

For their annual support of the programme, we would like to thank our shareholders, the Free State of Bavaria, and the Gesellschaft der Freunde der Stiftung Haus der Kunst München e. V. Our special thanks go to our major supporter, the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung, for its generous support of our work. We also thank the Ulli and Uwe Kai-Stiftung for its long-standing commitment. In addition, we thank the Beisheim Foundation for funding the “Third Place”.