I’ve become a bit obsessed with this artist’s project: arachnophilia—an exploration of the architecture of webs and entanglements.
It includes both a 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional digital archive of webs. AND a beautiful app of spider TAROT, which turns over a card when you share a picture of a web you’ve found(!). The artist, Tomás Saraceno, writes: “The word ‘text’ derives from texere, to weave. The stories we wave together are acts of sympoietic creation: they help us in building new worlds, and imagining different ways of living together, new modes of interspecies care and attunement. As we continually collect stories, images, fragments and histories—scientific or folkloric—about spiders and webs, we extend an open invitation to all to share with us their own stories and images.” And there is a film and links to spider divination (!) in Cameroon and I’m just in love with all of it. And there is a book about the history of spider divination practices(!). Just freaking gorgeous and downright inspired.
This is a lovely way to share digital collections—an online exhibit on early Japanese textile and candy designs.
A project on the history and power of women’s gossip in archival collections.
Surprise—Roman merchants were also women.
And a gorgeous spider poem:
Mount Elbrus
Spiderlight, sticky expectant dread:
I turn and turn, only more entangled
In today...
We need bread, and we need plain air,
But we need, too, some distant unbreathable peak,
Some eye-annihilating glare...
If the ache is nameless, how do I ask for ease?
If the I itself is exile, can the soul survive
Such private ice?
Old touchstone, to touch a stone, but in all that I have known,
Never, not once, such clear
Dreamweeping distillations of atmosphere...
We need poetry to wake the dark we are,
To find us and bind us beyond us
To an age of wakefulness
In the one day's unentangling sun,
Our breathing easy, ancient, like the pulse and peace
Of iambs counting down to silence.
(January 19, 1937)
--Osip Mandelstam, trans. Christian Wiman
Indeed a moose’s world! ♥️
I'm grateful to be living in a moose's world and envious of your proximity to it!