Yesterday we looked at Ed Atkins' installation at the 58th International Art Exhibition in Venice. There are actually more works by Atkins scattered around the Central Pavilion of the Giardini: visitors will indeed find the series of drawings entitled "Bloom", hanging in different rooms of this space. In these drawings a tarantula is portrayed on a hand or on a foot. There is something incredibly sinister in the spider as its body is replaced by the artist's face.
Spiders are usually employed by artists as metaphors (think about Louise Bourgeois), but all spider symbolisms are removed from these drawings, characterized by a style that points at graphic novels and by the theme of repetition.
Yet there is another artist who looked at spiders as an inspiration with very different and more poetic and intriguing results. Just outside the Central Pavilion in the Giardini there is the "Spider/Web Pavilion 7" by Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno. It can be easily spotted as it is a covered with a collage of Matthäus Merian's 1650 and Jacopo de’ Barbari's 1500 maps of Venice.
Darkness envelops you upon stepping inside it, but, as you turn a corner, you are confronted by a bright light under which shines a a large and beautiful spider web that occupies most of the space.
Studio Tomás Saraceno catalogued various spider/web species from a wide geographic distribution, highlighting seven major web typologies - orb, tent, space, sheet, lace, underwater and hybrid spider/webs.
The spider web on display in the pavilion is of the hybrid type, a novel kind of web typology conceived and realised by Saraceno with the assistance of two or more different spider species, and constructed in an open frame carbon fibre structure.
The installation, inspired by the Mambila Nggam divination practiced in Western and Central Africa, is accompanied by arachnomancy cards based on 18th and 19th century texts about spiders (during the course of the Biennale there will be different events linked to this pavilion including divination sessions based on spider/web interpretations).
The spider web comes from Saraceno’s studio, and the original spiders that wove it do not inhabit it anymore.
Saraceno hopes local spiders will climb on it maybe adding more threads, yet creating a new habitat for the spiders in the Giardini is not the main purpose of this installation.
Saraceno has indeed been studying spider webs from different perspectives and points of view. The artist conceives spider webs as entanglements between different species, disciplines and research methodologies.
Over more than a decade Saraceno put together an interdisciplinary network exploring scientific, philosophical, cultural and artistic connections between humans and spiders/webs. He reunited all these studies and experimental practices on the Arachnophilia platform.
Saraceno looked at spiders and astrophysics, biomateriomics and biotremology, linking arachnology to architecture, social science and anthropology via refreshing collaborations across science, art and the humanities. He also launched projects with the Laboratory for Atomist and Molecular Mechanics and Centre for Art, Science and Technology at MIT and The Max Planck Institute.
With the latter Saraceno studied the mechanics of spider silk, while in collaboration with researchers at the Photogrammetric Institute, Technische Universität Darmstadt, the artist developed a fascinating Spider Web Scan to create a 3D archive of spider/web typologies.
Saraceno also studied the applications of spider silk, the power of arachnosonics, that is the sound of spider/web vibrations, and spider divination (still used in different parts of the world, to forecast for example meteorological events).
The main point of this work therefore is not just bridging the gap between art, science and technology, but creating a space to care for spiders, look at spider webs as pavilions with no boundaries and no national representation (and this reflection directly links to the current political situation in which nationalisms are eroding European unity), and consider how the current ecological crisis is having a dramatic impact on the decline of the invertebrate (insects and spiders) populations and species diversity.
To this purpose, Saraceno built an archive of maps of spider/web ecologies that he hopes will prompt visitors to transform their arachnophobia - at times induced also by the bad reputation spiders have in horror films - into arachnophilia.
Visitors enchanted by Saraceno's studies and projects can discover more about the spiders (Bathyphantes gracilis, Centromerus sylvaticus, Amaurobius erberi, Tiso vagans, Mangora acalypha and Zilla diodia among the others) and web typologies (sheet, space and orb) Saraceno and his team mapped in Venice.
Those visitors who want instead to have a go at divination can download (the highly addictive) Arachnomancy app that will allow them to get their oracle based on the Arachnomancy Cards in the Spider/Web Pavilion.
Pick one of the cards, find a spider/web around you, take a picture of it, ask a question to the spider/web oracle and get your arachnomancy reading. Or you can actively join Saraceno's research by submitting your spider/web oracle picture and location to Arachnophilia, contributing to the collective endeavour of mapping spiders against extinction.
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