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.

VISIT NGGÀM DÙ

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.