Video by MONA // Jan. 31, 2020
Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno’s Berlin studio is a space for experimentation and testing out intricate ideas. His working process is interdisciplinary, Saraceno uses knowledge from different fields like engineering, physics, chemistry, aeronautics and material science in his creative process. His Berlin studio contains a room devoted to his spiders, who form the basis of Saraceno’s ‘Arachnophilia’ project. Since 2006, Saraceno has been engaged in arachnid research from the perspective of the web. This work is an exploration of the webs’ and spiders’ behaviour and it materializes in the spider/web archive.
We spoke to the artist during his recent exhibition ‘Algo-r(h)i(y)thms’ at Esther Schipper gallery last November, about the complexities of these creatures and how they inform his acoustic installations. The space at Esther Schipper gallery was transformed into a web-like landscape of nets containing 3.4 kilometres of black cord. The exhibition explored the behaviours of the web-building spider, which is essentially blind and creates an image of the world through the tremors it sends and receives through the web. The web is thus considered a material extension of the spider’s own senses, and—some argue—of its mind. Saraceno’s work, more generally, invites us to rethink the future of our planet from an interspecies perspective.
