“Tomás Saraceno in Collaboration: Ancestral Futures”

Amusement park extravaganza and environmental activism don’t make natural bedfellows. Yet this summer, they were brought together in a sprawling exhibition by the art world’s favorite arachnophile, Tomás Saraceno. The museum made a big, TED-talk press pitch, promising “a platform for rethinking forms of coexistence across human and non-human worlds.” With lethal heatwaves visiting Europe every summer these days, it’s not a bad time to question how art can contribute to our relationship with nature. In this case, the conclusion was double: both too much and not nearly enough.

One large, dark room housed the installation Towards the Sanctuary of Water (2026). Enormous orbs and bubbles, made from plastic and glass, were suspended above a false pond, reflecting beams of projected light. Line-drawn animals glowed on the wall and loudspeakers rumbled, as if foreshadowing the arrival of an enormous beast—shades, here, of the T-Rex’s big debut in Jurassic Park (1993). Spooky, interspecies dreamworld seemed to be the intention. But if art is going to enter spectacle, it needs do so with wild abandon. This might’ve have allowed Saraceno to echo nature’s profound weirdness. Instead, we got Universal Studios–lite as one note in a potpourri of approaches, each discordant with the last. After leaving the bubble room, viewers entered an ad hoc interpretive center. In this brightly lit, sandy-floored room, facts about the preciousness of water systems were displayed on a freestanding wall.

A beautiful textile, made from sheep and llama wool, dyed with natural pigments and titled Weaving with Red Atacama (2026), was handwoven by members from eleven Indigenous communities in Argentina. Viewers were invited to rest and recline on the textile, an offer whose appeal was nullified in advance by its antiseptic white cube presentation. Saraceno’s ongoing “2-Dimensional Webs Archive/Maps and Traces” series was likewise dead on arrival. Made by coating spiderwebs with ink, the images were presented against cold white backgrounds and puffed up with pseudo-scientific titles like Expanse NGC 1999 by a Tegenaria Domestica (2016). Spiders spend most of their time engineering incomparably precise death traps, yet here they have inspired a body of work that feels numb to its materials and snared in confusion.

Further on, another darkened room showcased works from “Webs of At-tent(s)ion” (2015–26): more webs sprawled in glass boxes, spotlit with the sensitivity of police interrogation lamps. It’s technically true that insects performing captive labor represent a rethought form of co-existence: someone had to rethink the certainty that spiders prefer fresh air over aquariums. In any case, the webs were incredible. Were they more so, though, than those spun in the thousands in the colossal English Garden, directly behind Haus der Kunst, or in any old tool shed?

Saraceno cribbed his show’s title from Brazilian philosopher Ailton Krenak’s 2024 book Ancestral Future (adding an “s” for a pluralistic ring). The show’s opening text paraphrases Krenak: “The future is nothing we need to invent—it is already here.” Undeterred by this good advice, Saraceno graced the museum terrace with “a new kind of urban architecture … for multispecies coexistence,” in the form of a massive, majestically gaudy metal birdhouse—part of his series “Cloud Cities: Species of Spaces and Other Pieces” (2023–26). Over sixty bird species breed in the English Garden and they may be grateful for the new housing. At the moment, though, their needs are catered for by trees, which, unlike metal boxes, don’t become toaster ovens in the summer heat.

The anarcho-primitivist philosopher John Zerzan once argued that art, far from bringing us closer to nature, alienates us from it. Before seeing Saraceno’s show, I’d found this position extreme. Yet the more the artist’s work fixates on its subject, the further it floats from reality, adrift on a cloud of hallucinogenic theory. A representative Saraceno text describes those boxed webs “materialising the multiple entanglements” between spiders, humans, and other animals, “like a musical instrument through which earthly and cosmic tremors resound.”1 Since prose this cartoonishly hubristic verges on an advanced new form of auto-critique, the challenge for critics is forced redundancy.

I did have one resonant encounter with non-human life in “Ancestral Futures.” It happened outside, as several non-captive wolf spiders spun webs over the didactic panel for Cloud Cities. Inside, Saraceno had hung scented “paintings” for dogs. It was a cute idea. But why—I almost heard my foundation art school instructor asking—paintings? Why not a form specific to the canine experience? It doesn’t take much sniffing around to find the answer: paintings for dogs are really paintings for people, who want to look at dogs smelling art.

The principal artistic mode of this exhibition was feel-good institutional-liberal populism. A person could, of course, play the “raising awareness” card, in which case the art is a moot point, and any gesture that triggers mildly warm feelings about spiders counts as a win. Given the stakes, this seems like the wrong approach.

Because the online cloud relies on lithium, mining of which destroys water systems, viewers were invited to doodle on photos of clouds. If this calls you to action, great. If not, you can pluck many long black strings, which had been woven into giant web structures, like children’s playground architecture. Doing so releases woodwind sounds, which may make you feel like a musical spider. But you aren’t. You’re a person. And you could be outside, opening your mind and heart to the real deal.