The spider/web is a dynamic, living species-habitat assemblage, its construction a story of tensions and attentions between the materials, surfaces, geologic forces and temporalities of its milieu. When the spider departs, the web it leaves behind is both a material memory and spatiotemporal diagram of the spider’s psychogeographic drifts on air: tracing past and tentative trajectories, mapping lines of thought. Transposing and reinscribing the dexterities of a spider’s silken architecture, using a handweaving technique borne through its own stories of relating to the world, the artworks produce a renewed at-tent(s)ion within its viewer and emerges analogous to proximal and distant webs across multitudinous scales—from the microscopic to the cosmic.

Inviting Argentine artist Carolina Berro into this process, a member of the Makiwan collective of 288 textile artisans from the Quebrada and Puna of Jujuy, Argentina, her use of the historic and trans-generational randa technique weaves a physical and symbolic story into its architecture. A story of the Arachne’s web; a story of Makiwan’s own networks, micro-networks and local communities: those that include the Red Puna, Uppajs, Lloque, Alfarcito, Cusi Cusi, Susques, Lagunillas del Farallón, Cieneguillas, Santa Ana and Caspalá.

During the randa process, a foundational mesh is first produced to support the actual embroidery, woven by hand with a thread as fine as the spiders’ own. A web for life, its nodes and connections speak to the environments its makers find themselves enmeshed within. For those that weave in such a way, the randeras as they are known, their stitches are directly informed by the very climate and ecologies surrounding their lives: droplets of rain that form along a spider’s web, ears of wheat that cluster in cloud-like formation, and geodesic arrangements formed within a bee’s honeycomb can all be read on the randa. Representative not only of interspecies processes, but an intra-species kind: the randa technique is one that has been for several lifetimes passed between mother and daughter, families of generational knowledge networks in their customs, memories and stories—all carried along through lines of thought and relation. As such, the randa is not only a process of weaving or craft, but one that envelops the stories of the randeras who wove them, and the exchange of teaching and learning this practice.

Weaving Arachne’s web acknowledges not only the biodiversity found throughout the region where the randeras practice, or the kinship and transmission of knowledge between them, but the manifold cosmologies through which the spider and its web has emerged historically as a divine symbol, producing from within itself the possibility for new relations. For the ancient civilisation of Nazca people, the spider was imaged in their ‘Nazca lines’ or geoglyphs, engraved directly onto the ground as schematic and geometric figures. Amongst the Mayans, the spider/web represents the placenta of Ix Chel, Maya goddess of childbirth and patron saint of weavers, and for whom the spider creates the thread of life from within itself. The Hopi in North America count on their Mujer Araña as both a powerful spirit and ally, whose magical agency of the Earth would teach the Navajo women to weave. For other Californian tribes, she is an avenging spirit that punishes evil. In the central plains of Cheyenne or Lakota she assumes the role of the trickster, much like the mythos of Kwaku Anansi, a rogue, arachnid folk hero in West African folklore whose cunning, unpredictable and liminal figure mediates between the gods of the sky and earth-bound humans. Arachne, as entangled within a ‘web of resistance’ with Greek goddess Athena, reveals a similar tale of mediation: of two women who use embroidery as a performative textuality, confronting and defending the social order. Across all, the spider wields power in its ability to weave a web of life—of one for life and the stories enmeshed within them.

In the knowledge that 5% of the world’s population currently protects 80% of its biodiversity, the artworks centre a practice of communities closest to the Earth’s stewardship. Within the artwork, the spider/web’s three-dimensional structure is re-woven as a planar mapping, its transposed threads draw a network across its frame. To map against extinction is to notice and become sensitive to the spider/web ecologies; to weave against might then to become an active agent in its processes of sense- and mythmaking, to co-author a meshwork of sensory and bodily relation.