Jorōgumo, a Yōkai of Japanese mythology that exists in the liminal space between woman and spider, serves as one of our guides into Saraceno’s exhibition. Featured in two of the artist’s three new Arachnomancy Cards, Jorōgumo blurs species boundaries and invites us to attune to a plane of radical interconnectedness, challenging hierarchical, patriarchal, and colonial power structures and celebrating those alternative forms of knowing and inhabiting the world that survive and subvert the homogenizing impulse of the Capitalocene, opening spaces for inter-species recognition. An extension of its cognitive system, the spider’s web allows for communication with the greater world through vibration, mapping its consciousness along threads like the neural map of our own brain. The 33 cards that make the Arachnomancy deck draw on this extended cognition, transforming it into an instrument of mediation, one of the many ways to consult spider/web oracles, messengers between perceptual worlds.

The oracle in the third Arachnomancy card created specifically for this exhibition is Argyroneta aquatica japonica, a Japanese subspecies of the water spider Argyroneta aquatica, featured in Saraceno’s short film Living at the bottom of the ocean of air, also on display at Towada Art Center. The unique behaviour of this spider reveals the capacity of certain species to transform their way of life to adapt to new environments, posing the question: Can the destructive logic of the Capitalocene be altered in response to climate change, zoonosis and species extinction caused by some humans?

Throughout the exhibition, Tomás Saraceno’s collaborations with spiders and the atmosphere offer a moment of transcendence, celebrating forms of wisdom that subvert the hierarchical relationship through which some organize the world and inviting us to reattune to the web of coexistence as it manifests at Towada Art Center.