This exhibition tells stories from the perspective of the web—which is not separate to the spider, but a material extension of its senses and thoughts, an assemblage that can be thought of as a spider/web. These hybrid webs, woven together by different species of spiders, become a figure of interspecies solidarity and embodied cognition. They invite us to consider the impossibility of differentiating the individual being from the web of life in which we are entangled, triggering a sentient reflection on perceiving worlds through the worlds and bodies of the others, just as the spiders in the hybrid web would be able to sense vibration traveling through the web of another spider. The silk of semi-social spiders forms an integral, cerebral, and literal web through the gallery spaces, making tangible the invisible recursive relations between earthly geometries and the greater cosmos.

Radio Galena is presented in the entryway of the gallery. A mineral sonic sculpture, the work is comprised of a stone wrapped in wire, which is not connected to the electrical grid. It uses no batteries or solar panels and yet, it can function as a radio in certain parts of the atmosphere, entering into reverberation and receiving radio waves. It acts like a traditional crystal receptor, one of the first radio receptors ever invented. This sort of talking stone proposes to focus on early and neglected forms of sound technology and to tune us in to ecological frequencies. Radio Galena can receive Ma-puche radio station, which is used by a group of indigenous inhabitants in southern Argentina who focus on their legal rights claim to land autonomy. Next to Radio Galena is a cosmic dust print, which further explores the invisible specks and particles that exist among us on earth. Created from a series of images in NASA’s “Cosmic Dust Catalogue” from 1982, this work is printed with black carbon PM2.5 pollution extracted from the air of Mumbai. The black carbon ink is printed on 8-gram hand made paper, as a photo giclée print.

In the center of the main gallery space balloons float, tethered to pens that draw on paper, framed, lying flat on the ground. Drawing with the air, every gesture of the balloons leave a trace. The movements of visitors and the heat of the space all translate as the potential language of earthly phenomena creating an emergent cartography of the air. Framed works composed with carbon-inked spider silk line the walls. The works’ titles feature the names, genus and species of the spider collaborators who came together to tune their strings, and the length of time needed to shape and compose these webs. They document the possibility of new spaces of co-habitation woven by spiders with different degrees of sociability. The installation challenges the idea of a hierarchical tree of life, and proposes hybridities between species and the worlds they inhabit.

In the adjacent gallery, three spider webs are presented in three-dimensions, encased in glass, spot lit. Each thread of spider silk is the path of a spider, imperceptibly guided by the fast moving molecules of the heated air. The floating threads of the “ballooning spiders” are a web in becoming, adrift on air until they meet a surface—bridging the spider/web’s ability to write their passage, their drifting, and ways forward. Resembling the maps of past courses and future routes drawn by spiders and their webs, the glowing sculptures become the real-life maps of suspended cities inhabited by the spider/web, each appearing in its own unique galaxy, floating within an expansive, infinite landscape.

In a third gallery space, another multispecies spider web is presented in a darkened room with an active laser. As the laser scans the web, the visual vibratory signals of light reveal the hidden textures woven by the spider. As light intersects the air, new choreographies of silk and light appear and fade away, registering the ungraspable wholeness of the web through the virtual, temporary fractions emerging through a red light, as in a photographic darkroom. In a tridimensional web, some threads will always be hidden by their own intricacy. In the representations of the universe, through sophisticated radio telescope or computational simulations, dark matter remains elusive because it does not interact with light. A great deal of the universe is yet to become visible, acting as a concealed web that holds what we can perceive together. This begs the question: how many webs, cosmic, ecological, social, are we still not capable of seeing?

The exhibition will also present a continuation of the artist’s Cloud Cities body of work. Conceived and inspired by the geometries of soap bubbles, the cluster-like artworks are composed of a number of interconnected modules, some with web-like structures set within them, which form geometric constellations inspired by the Weaire-Phelan structure. The Cloud Cities project is intimately tied to and embodied in the Aerocene: an era-in-the-making, a community, a non-profit foundation. As a movement for eco-social justice, adrift on air, floating free from fossil fuels, lithium or hydrogen, Aerocene moves us towards an ethical re-alliance with the Earth and its cosmic web(s) of life. Rooted in slower activism and weather-dependent interdependency, Aerocene stands as a platform for climate justice, an eco-social energy transition, human and more-than-human rights and alternative modes of knowing and sensing.

In conversation with and hanging alongside the Cloud Cities installation is a Zonal Harmonic. Situated within the artist’s interest in astronomical techniques and cosmological subjects, the work is composed of orbits held together purely by their mutual tension (tensegrity). The sculpture takes into account discrepancies in temporality that derive from variations of speed, tilt angles and orbits of celestial bodies. This work further illustrates Saraceno’s fascination with systems of interconnectedness and constantly shifting structures, at once seemingly fragile, yet also a tightly coiled center for potential.