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Matter(s) for Conversation and Action

Particular Matter(s)

Silent Autumn

From Arachnophobia to Arachnophilia

Inter + Play 2

Ha Chi Ki

we do not all breathe the same air

Nggàm dù

Lignes de possibles: Arachnophilia with Tomás Saraceno at the Festival La Manufacture d’idées

AnarcoAracnoAnacroArcano

Du sol au soleil

Webs of Life

Movement

Museo Aero Solar: for an Aerocene era

Interspecies Conversations

Avec qui venez-vous? Vinciane Despret in conversation with Tomás Saraceno
Prototype of Maratus volans (peacock spider), Web of Life (2020) | for a real Augmented Reality

The Art of Noticing – Louisiana Channel Interviews Tomás Saraceno

Radio Galena

Free the Air: Aerocene – Tomás Saraceno holds keynote speech at Herald Design Forum

Up Close: Tomás Saraceno in conversation with Harriet A. Washington

How to hear the universe in a spider/web: A live concert for/by invertebrate rights

Songs for the Air

Moving Atmospheres

Event Horizon

Aria
Fly with Aerocene Pacha

Invertebrate Rights for “Down to Earth”

Spider/Web Pavilion 7

Arachnomancy Cards

Acqua Alta: en Clave de Sol

On the Disappearance of Clouds

Tomás Saraceno. Aria at Cinema Odeon

Sundial for Spatial Echoes

2-Dimensional Webs Archive/Maps and Traces

Algo-r(h)i(y)thms

Tomás Saraceno at the Venice Biennale 2019
More-than-humans

Arachnophilia Community Meeting with MIT Professor Markus J Buehler

Beyond the Cradle 2019: Space and the Arts

Engadin Art Talks: Grace and Gravity

How to entangle the universe in a spider/web?

Printed Matter(s)

Webs of At-tent(s)ion

Art Basel Miami – Albedo | Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Tomás Saraceno

ON AIR

The Politics of Solar Rhythms: Cosmic Levitation

Living at the bottom of the ocean of air

Sounding the Air

“ON AIR live with…”

Spider/Web Oracle Readings Program

Algo-r(h)i(y)thms

Passages of Time

Particular Matter(s) Jam Session

Solar Rhythms

A Thermodynamic Imaginary

Hybrid Webs

How to Entangle the Universe in a Spider Web
Silent Autumn
Gravitational Waves

Our Interplanetary Bodies

Aerosolar Journeys

Stillness in Motion — Cloud Cities

163,000 Light Years

Tomás Saraceno’s Cloud Cities and Solar Balloon Travel – Interview with The Creators Project

Cosmic Jive: The Spider Sessions

Solar Bell

In Orbit

Ring Bell — Solar Orchestra and the Wind Structures

Moving Beyond Materiality – MIT Visiting Artist Tomás Saraceno

On the Roof: Cloud City

On Space Time Foam

Cloud Cities

14 Billions (Working Title)

Galaxies Forming along Filaments, like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web

Observatory, Air-Port-City

Poetic Cosmos of the Breath

Flying Garden/Air-Port-City
Nggàm dù
is a web portal by, with and for
the spider diviners of Somié, Cameroon.

Spider diviner Bollo Pierre Tadios poses a question during a ‘nggàm dù’ divination in Somié, 2019.
Courtesy of the diviner, Somié and Nggàm dù.
Photography by Studio Tomás Saraceno.
A multilayered project for myriad translations between human and spiderly responses, passed across the interstices of language, time zones, and species. To seek out a more equal balance of human, techno-, and biodiversity, the practice opens a dialogue with our arachnid kin. The project has been made at the request of spider diviners in Somié, with the Arachnophilia community and its founding member Tomás Saraceno.
The word “ŋgam” (nggàm) refers both to a method of divination practiced by the Mambila people and the ground-dwelling spider whose wisdom its diviners consult. During ŋgam dù, a set of binary questions are put forward to the spider oracle, whose response is interpreted via the spider’s specific rearrangements of the arachnomancer’s divination cards. These cards are produced using stiff plant leaves from which symbolic shapes have been excised, and which have been arranged around the entrance to the spider’s burrow. This practice has been described by a number of scholars, including details published in the 1964 book by Paul Gebauer, Spider Divination in the Cameroons.
Somié is one of the main Mambila villages in Cameroon, with a population upwards of 5,000 people. Located within the northern borderlands that connect Cameroon with Nigeria, the people of Somié speak Jù Bà, a local dialect of the Mambila language. The village has several schools, churches and mosques, and a busy weekly market. Most of the Somié population are farmers, growing crops to sell at the market as well as for their own consumption; many grow coffee on the forest peripheries that cover the hillsides across the region. The program for funding is entangled by three interconnected threads of care: the rehabilitation of the Somié’s water system, the ongoing work of a local reforestation initiative and a programming of arts and cultural projects.
In line with the project’s ambitions of preserving the practice of ŋgam dù and supporting the people of Somié, interested participants will be invited to consult with the spider(s) upon donation of a set fee. All of the money raised through each consultation will then be distributed to a program of local projects and the remuneration for each diviners’ work. For more information on how to participate and/or donate, please contact Studio Tomás Saraceno via the Nggàm dù web portal.

Spider diviner Bollo Pierre Tadios presenting his set of divination leaf-cards (mvu ŋgam) in the village of Somié, carved by hand in the shape of the Mambila’s shield, 2019.
Courtesy of the diviner, Somié and Nggàm dù.
Photography by Studio Tomás Saraceno.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
From among the community of diviners in Somié, Nggàm dù presents the work of Bollo Pierre Tadios, a painter and diviner who has been practicing for most of his adult life. Tadios’s family is connected to the chief of Somié, and Tadios has played a crucial role in village affairs, serving as a forest guard and helping to deter wildlife poaching in the area. Zeitlyn, a professor of anthropology at Oxford University who has been collaborating with the Mambila people in Cameroon since 1985, has been involved with a long-term exchange within the village, partly through his extensive research and publishing on Mambila divination. In collaboration with Tomás Saraceno.
Supported by David Zeitlyn and Penny Fraser, with Studio Tomás Saraceno, Aerocene and Arachnophilia, in particular Ollie George, Ally Bisshop, Sarah Kisner, Dario J Laganà, Lars Behrendt, Claudia Meléndez, Manuela Mazure and Jillian Meyer.