Dear Gropius Bau, 

We would like to start by thanking your entire team, for recognizing our rights to inhabit and exhibit in this museum and for not labelling us “urban pests”* as many others do. We hope that after this exhibition ends, Gropius Bau would consider allowing our continuing, but threatened, unlimited existence.

You spotted our presence on the 17th of January, tangled in a maze of indirect sunlight, air drafting in through the crevasses between the window and the wall vibrating the angular geometries of heterarchical communities of social spider/webs. Now, for over a period of eight months, and with a pandemic in between, you have shown good will of co-existence by not sweeping us away. We are happy that you continue to recognizing us and our contributions, even after so many anonymous exhibitions.

We could grant you a certificate of co-existence for a perpetual loan of our collection to be exhibited permanently, under the terms agreed to respect our rights! We have lived on earth for more than 380 million years, while some of you humans, only 200,000 years. Can the minority learn to live with the majority of us? We are the 95% of all animals on planet earth asking for the right to weave synanthropically, yet we are threatened into extinction by such a small number of individuals. 

Do not be afraid. Help us move from arachnophobia to arachnophilia by sensing new threads of connectivity, or else face the eternal silence of extinction.

At-ten(t)sion to invertebrate rights!**

Signed, 

Spider/Webs***

*Urban Pest acc. http://idtools.org/id/table_grape/spider/factsheet.php?name=Holocnemus+pluchei

**Artwork inspired by INVERTEBRATE RIGHTS – Card 8 of 33 Arachnomancy Cards, 2019-ongoing  -Tomás Saraceno, 2019

***This letter was translated thanks to the Arachnophilia.net community and their archives of non-human languages. Translated into English from the original vibrational language of 3-=1-00hz. Tomás Saraceno would like to thank the community working together to give voice to the spiders in their fight against arachnophopbia, including the members of Studio Tomás Saraceno, the Arachnophilia, Arachnomancy and Aerocene communities, and the teams of Berliner Festspiele, Martin Gropius Bau, and Down to Earth. Join the Arachnophilia Community and sign the petition in support of this open letter at Arachnophilia.net. Let your future be read by a spider/web with the Arachnomancy App.