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Tomás Saraceno, 'How to Entangle the Universe in a Spider Web', 2017

 


Tomás Saraceno's interests in spider webs might seem uncannily odd to some viewers, however, to put aside that arachnophobia is to produce intriguing works of art. Boxed in and spectacularly spot lit, the works are confined by an omnipresent curator and the hand of Saraceno is certainly present, yet there is still room for freedom, for uniqueness. Their display in the round enables a visitor to explore for themselves. Simplistically black and white with no fuss, they are mesmeric displays, ritualistic and quietly captivating. 

Saraceno has made a name for himself through 'Arachnophilia', a community of researchers striving to know more about the spider web and its uses. However, the artist has also spoken at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, he has created his own 3D models of webs and he works across both media and scale with incredible ease - for instance, in 2022, he transformed 25,000 square feet in The Shed, New York, into a web stretched at both twelve and forty feet above ground, so that viewers entered and were literally floating in the space. Saraceno plays with the different realms of the cosmic and the real, and the photograph in question here is taken from his How to Entangle the Universe in a Spider Web exhibition from 2017 in Argentina, his place of birth, where the artist incorporated video, sound and collaborated with 7000 spiders. 

Spiders can adapt their webs to changes in climate, location and pollution. Not only are they creatures which carry mystical, spiritual symbolism associated with good fortune, death, rebirth and more, interlacing cultures together in a complex tangle of motifs and interactions, but their webs are geometrically precise, constantly changing and never the same twice. Saraceno's artworks in particular look to the scientific potentials of the spider web, illustrating the meshing together of the universe and planetary boundaries. Saraceno in fact invented a complex method to three-dimensionally scan, digitise and reconstruct spider webs. It was this interest which fuelled his developments beyond the arachnophile fascination, including his 2018 exhibition Algo-r(h)i(y)thms - monolithic, architectonic creations which recall not webs but instead, larger atomic structures. Perhaps it is the artist's background in architecture which fuels him to develop new methods of construction, and in turn, esoteric and educationally enriching works of art. Although Saraceno seems to look to the future and represent the everchanging face of contemporary art, his diversity has actually been compared to that of a 'Renaissance man' holding universal knowledge, reaching from biology to architecture, from art to astrophysics. Perhaps this is the true face of art that is slowly being revealed to us as viewers and consumers - that of interdisciplinarity. 

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