Martin Faass: Among the works which you will be showing in Darmstadt, there are three-dimensional sculptures, interwoven by unrelated spider species. How do you choose the spiders that create your art and where do you get them from? 

Tomás Saraceno: Actually, the spider/webs choose me! There are myriad spider/webs already cohabiting with us: inside our homes, my studio in Berlin, across Europe, on almost every part of this shared planet. They’re also here in your museum, outside of these artworks! It’s just these other spider/webs did not arrive by invitation. With this exhibition, we hope that people begin to notice their spider/web neighbours differently; to move past personal or cultural arachnophobia. We want to acknowledge that living spider/webs face extinction—themselves becoming curious museological relics—if we do not recognize the violence of historical and ongoing extractive gestures, and shift our thinking about the ‘natural’ world. 

Nature does not belong to us; we belong to nature. We have so many geopolitical projections borne from human exceptionalism, and yet spiders have existed for around 380 million years, while Homo sapiens only appeared 200-300 thousand years ago. Still we think we can “invite” spiders in. We have to see spider/webs not as pests, but as our predecessors and active co-creators of our lifeworlds. Some biologists say that any species needs at least 2 million years to truly understand how to live in a place. If we follow this logic, (some) humans have a long way to go. 

MF: So you consider spiders as partners in your artwork?

TS: It is still very much their art; we produce it together.

You can see this also in the app and project Arachnomancy, inspired by cultural traditions of spider divination, which invites users to have their future read by the spider/web oracles they encounter in their everyday, attuning to them in the process, and thus beginning to recognize shared responsibilities of care.

MF: How would you define the role that nature plays in your artwork?

TS: I don’t think of nature as a separate entity that can be integrated in my work. Humans have set themselves apart from nature, classifying it as an entity that is exterior to us. As a species we are fascinated with understanding others , but not necessarily their and our “Umwelten” or associated worlds, as Jakob von Uexküll put forth almost a century ago. This is why historically we have felt free to remove animals from their context and put them on display, like taking the spider from the web. As a species among many, spiders need and are deeply entangled with their environment(s), just as we need and are entangled with ours. To understand why we are facing mass extinction, ecosystems have to be thought of as complex webs of interaction and implication. A logic of human exceptionalism—or a separation of nature and culture—therefore misses the point.

MF: You want to establish a new connection between nature and history?

TS: History has always been natural! It’s a modern invention to separate “human” realms—art, culture, the social—from nature. This has been an important discussion in anthropology in the past twenty years, and more recently in the visual arts. Many interrogate the separation between nature and culture as a constructed and historical, rather than a real, innate distinction. 

The idea that we can effectively separate the two in reality and not only in concept is pure hubris. Think of the “spotless” white cube museum or gallery—in actuality there are myriad particles, creatures, spiders, dust all present. And we clean constantly to try to get rid of them, yet they return. What if we just recognized these other voices? The artwork Songs for the Air sonifies the particles and dust through a technology we developed. Maybe the dust that gathers on top of vitrines and the spider/webs that adorn their shelves could tell us another history, if we found ways to attune you their forms of communicating.

Bruno Latour says that “we have never been modern,” that all these modern categories fail when applied to our experience. Museums are part of this project of separation but in fact they have never been modern either. We urgently need to let go of the ideas museums reiterate based on the supposedly “modern” divide between natural and cultural history, which, as Phillipe Descola writes, is a Western idea. You see how insidious it is when looking at what art gets put in art museums versus “natural history” museums—Western creations in the former and Indigenous, African, Asian, in the latter. We need to unpack where these divisions come from and why, to decolonise our thinking and understand better the complex web of relations we are part of. 

MF: Darmstadt, specifically the Technical University, was in a way very important to develop some of this technology you mention, wasn’t it?

TS: Yes, over ten years ago I worked with the TU’s Photogrammetric Institute to create an original laser-supported tomographic method for achieving the first ever 3D spider/web digital scan.This technique has sparked many amazing knowledge paths, and we continue to expand its possible applications—most recently through an ongoing collaboration with Professor Markus Buehler at MIT. The aim is to make a 3D spider/web archive available to collaborators, to share knowledge and learn more about entangled spider+web ecologies. Also, in 2016 in the context of 48th International New Music Festival, Darmstadt, I am so proud to say that in the place where John Cage and Stockhausen gave their seminal lectures, we gave voice with a nonhuman concert with spider/webs. I’m especially happy to come back with a new ensemble, sonifying the air! 

MF: So it’s great that the project we are working on has so strong a link to Darmstadt after all these years.

TS: Yes, so beautiful. I am happy to be back. I was also able to meet Peter Jäger, Head of Arachnology at Frankfurt’s Senckenberg Natural History Museum; a great friend of mine that I have been collaborating with for more than 15 years.

MF: Finally, what do you want everyone to take away from this exhibition?

TS: I think firstly to recognise the term spider/web—which respects the interconnectedness of a body and its world—and to work together to sense new threads of connectivity, moving from arachnophobia to arachnophilia! It would be great if we could all consider also the role of the museum and listen to voices that ask for repatriation of museum objects. This is an important contemporary conversation. We may think about it in relation to cultural heritage, but I also want to think about reparation in the context of our “Umwelten”.  What needs to be given back to nonhumans? And how, by sonifying particles in the air, the audience begins to think about their own Umwelt, which includes pollution. What if we could repair carbon emissions and redistribute wealth gained by more affluent countries who for too long have offloaded toxic consequences onto the Global South? Is this kind of reverse migration a form of decolonisation as well? Decolonize the air from phobias to philias, and  allow the atmosphere to enter a new era of solidarity.