These two green spaces are home to several species of spider, some of whom also build webs. Connected to this garden is the Pineta di Santa Elena (34,000 m2), home to many conifers interspersed by grasslands. This includes the Biennale Gardens (Giardini Napoleonici e Biennale), which is 19,000 m2. Despite the relatively small number of green areas within the city of Venice, many spider/webs make their home there amongst the plants and bushes of Venice’s gardens. Many species of spider are synanthropes, which means that over millions of years of cohabitation with humans, have adapted to anthropogenic environments, and can thrive in man-made structures. In comparison, Stockholm has 15-20m2 green space per person, and London has up to 40m2 per person (Marzi, 1986). Venice has one of the lowest proportions of public green space (parklands, etc.) of any European city, with only roughly 1,59 m2 green space per person. Invertebrate animals (insects and spiders) are critical elements of our shared and entangled ecologies: among other things, insects are responsible for pollination of mainstay crops, decomposition of organic material (creating the humus that is an essential component of fungal, bacterial and life cycles), and also providing a critical food source for birds and other higher order animals.Įssentially - the death of insects would trigger a catastrophic ripple effect in the ecologies and systems that support life on Earth what scientists have called a “bottom-up trophic cascade”, whose knock-on effects would be disastrous for both plant and animal life. An insect armageddon would be catastrophic for human and other forms of life. A number of scientists have argued that we are now bearing witness to the dawn of a sixth mass extinction. However, according to recent data, insect populations are declining at a rate of 2.5% per year - suggesting that they might be extinct by the end of the century. It is often hard to reconcile the idea of extinction with creatures that seem so abundant. Insect life far outweighs human life: insects make up half of the 2 gigatons of animal life on this planet. Collective mapping allows us to access new scales and new points of view through which to collaboratively think through concepts of multispecies care, extinction, and the possibilities for living together in catastrophic times. In these counter-cartographies, mapping is engaged as a means of visualising and raising awareness of spider/web habitats as constitutive elements of broader, more-than-human ecologies. Recognising the history of mapping practices in establishing geopolitical divisions and boundaries that exclude and reinforce hierarchical distributions of power and claims to land and natural resources, we imagine these as spider/web counter-cartographies, an attempt to tell the neglected histories of spider/webs.

Through this shared activity, we hope to map spider/web species richness and diversity within the multispecies ecologies that we share. Saraceno’s work, more generally, invites us to rethink the future of our planet from an interspecies perspective.In the context of the global decline in invertebrate (insect and spider) populations and species diversity, we invite you to join us in a collaborative mapping exercise: to notice and become sensitive to spider/web eccologies.

The web is thus considered a material extension of the spider’s own senses, and-some argue-of its mind. The exhibition explored the behaviours of the web-building spider, which is essentially blind and creates an image of the world through the tremors it sends and receives through the web. The space at Esther Schipper gallery was transformed into a web-like landscape of nets containing 3.4 kilometres of black cord.

We spoke to the artist during his recent exhibition ‘Algo-r(h)i(y)thms’ at Esther Schipper gallery last November, about the complexities of these creatures and how they inform his acoustic installations.

This work is an exploration of the webs’ and spiders’ behaviour and it materializes in the spider/web archive. Since 2006, Saraceno has been engaged in arachnid research from the perspective of the web. His Berlin studio contains a room devoted to his spiders, who form the basis of Saraceno’s ‘Arachnophilia’ project. His working process is interdisciplinary, Saraceno uses knowledge from different fields like engineering, physics, chemistry, aeronautics and material science in his creative process. Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno’s Berlin studio is a space for experimentation and testing out intricate ideas.

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