Across history, fears of the arachnid have found expression in Western imagination, where spiders have long been cast as sinister, abject, and threatening. Yet the phobia of the arachnid reveals less about the invertebrate itself than the cultural imagination that defines it: a fear projected, systematized, transmitted. Elsewhere, spiders appear otherwise: in one such case as oracles, consulted today by the Mambila people in Somié, Cameroon, for whom Saraceno built a web portal (Nggamdu.org) through which local diviners now offer their services to the world.

From such inheritances, a framed series departs, reopening the encyclopedic entry on arachnophobia to transform fear’s lexicon into a web of kinship. Across its pages, fear expands beyond the body, revealed as something learned, rehearsed, and enforced—a system that organises perception and belonging. In this gesture, the architectures of fear are turned instead toward the architectures of care, in an invitation to feel-with rather than recoil-from.

Such orientations underpin Arachnophilia, the project-community Saraceno founded which syncretises diverse forms of knowledge through a shared affinity with spider/webs; not only as architectures of silk, but as cosmological diagrams and instruments of relation that, for many cultures, mirror the interconnectedness of life.