The book Tomás Saraceno. Life(s) of webs: arachnophobias, arachnophilias, and other stories is published in conjunction with the permanent installation of the same title by Tomás Saraceno in the Church of the Madonna del Carmine, located in the National Museum of Matera.
It features essays discussing the role of spider/webs in different cultures from an inter-species perspective and a section with color images dedicated to the work in Matera.
From Saraceno's introduction:
"I have always been completely fascinated by spider/webs. Partly growing up in Italian exile, perhaps it was their ability to make a home anywhere and with materials they carry with them, inside, that so captivated me. Their webs have often been used as an analogy between the cosmic and the terrestrial webs of life, and continue reverberating inside me. Sometimes you can barely see them, and yet they contain a whole world, expressing the immense wisdom accumulated from hundreds of millions of years of life on Earth.
Arachnophobia has therefore also always been a great mystery to me. How could anyone fear this small, incredibly sophisticated being? These questions have led me on a path to connect with other people and cultures like myself—of whom there are many, across the globe and throughout time—who do not abhor spiders, but respect them—in some cases, even worship them."
"When, through the Arachnophilia community, we ask some people to rescind arachnophobia, it is a call to consider life across all its webs; to weave together ways of living that do not destroy the environment, but work towards more just, ecosocial, inter and intraspecies societies for all."
Tomás Saraceno's (born 1973 in San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina, lives and works in Berlin) oeuvre could be seen as an ongoing research, informed by the worlds of art, architecture, natural sciences, astrophysics and engineering; his floating sculptures, community projects and interactive installations propose and explore new, sustainable ways of inhabiting and sensing the environment. Aerocene, an open-source community project for artistic and scientific exploration initiated from Saraceno's vision, becomes buoyant only by the heat of the Sun and infrared radiation from the surface of Earth.
In 2015, Saraceno achieved the world record for the first and longest certified fully-solar manned flight. During the past decade, he has initiated collaborations with renowned scientific institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Max Planck Institute, the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, and the Natural History Museum London.
He was the first person to scan, reconstruct and reimagine spiders' weaved spatial habitats, and possesses the only three-dimensional spider web collection to existence.
