we're asked to consider the social and technological “webs” of our livesIt hasn’t been easy for Tomás Saraceno to locate a spider web in his white-walled, plant-filled home in Berlin on this bright, mid-March morning. But here, high up in the corner of the glass doors that lead onto a balcony overlooking the River Spree — down which he can, if the mood takes him, make the short commute to his studio by kayak — he’s in luck.
“The spider has built his own pavilion in the basement of the gallery!” he says. “We hope that many spiders will come to the exhibition, will weave their webs, and that by reducing the climate control of the gallery, and not using products or materials that are chemically aggressive to these forms of life, then you will see a lot of spider webs.
He likes them not only for the intricacy of the structures they make — he has made beautiful, spectral sculptures in which different spider species weave webs on top of each other’s — but also for the blurring of boundaries they invite. Take, for example, the idea that the spider and its web are two separate entities: “The web is part of their body,” he says. “They cannot eat until they sense through their webs.