The Spider/Web Oracle Readings Program at the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia encouraged broader interactions between humans, spiders and other species whose entangled relations are often obscured in the haze of humans’ self-professed priority. Dissipating this fog by calling attention to the symbiotic threads that broker human and non-human connectivities—whether these relationships are mutually beneficial, commensal, amensalic, or parasitic—the program shed new light on collective, multi-species futures.

Participants were invited to Spider/Web Pavilion 7 to illuminate these age-old interwoven relations by way of scientific, philosophical, and cultural images or stories: a constellation of scientists, musicians, theorists, anthropologists, and poets—even meditation experts and tarot readers. Upon entering the Pavilion each participant is met with a dense array of Hybrid Spider/Webs, a novel kind of web typology conceived and realized by Tomás Saraceno with the assistance of myriad arachnid kin. These webs, made up of orbs, sheets, tents, and dome-like labyrinths, speak to the complex fabric of inter-species connections; relationships that were meaningfully decoded throughout the course of the Readings.

As free interpretations of the idea of “reading” collective futures through the spider/web, the individual performances coalesced in relation to the performer and their own unique web of relations, merging together to articulate the interdisciplinary modes of thinking, feeling and knowing the multiple strands of species interconnection in the current age of ecological crisis. The first iteration of Spider/Web Oracle Readings Program ran from 8–11 May. Further interactions emerged throughout the duration of May You Live In Interesting Times, Biennale Arte 2019, curated by Ralph Rugoff.

Find further information and the programme’s archive at arachnophilia.net.