“It’s a spiderweb concert! It’s a concert you’re not meant to be hearing. “We have recorded all the spider activities, and we’re playing back the vibration,” he said. “But they are able to perceive the world through vibration.” He crawled into the web and lay down. “The spiders who weave webs have poor vision,” Saraceno said. Docents, after delivering a safety briefing, would encourage participants to climb in. He pointed up to a work called “Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web,” a metal spiderweb, ninety-five feet in diameter, suspended from a point forty feet above the ground. “I just put up the frame, invite the spider to come, they weave the web, and then they move out and the art work is ready,” Saraceno said. The show at the Shed includes a collection of seven webs displayed in glass frames. It was heated entirely by air and sunlight. Two years ago, a schoolteacher named Leticia Noemi Marqués broke thirty-two world records when she piloted another balloon, “Aerocene Pacha,” over Argentinean salt flats. One project, “Museo Aero Solar,” involves balloons made of reused plastic bags. In his work, Saraceno focusses on spiders and sustainable hot-air balloons. “But, when you looked carefully, it was full of life.” Saraceno spent some time alone, in the attic, looking at spiderwebs. His mother, a botanist, relocated the family to a five-hundred-year-old house in northern Italy. Saraceno, who is forty-eight, was born in San Miguel de Tucumán, in Argentina, where his father, an agronomist, was imprisoned before the right-wing coup in 1976. WE HOPE THAT AFTER THIS EXHIBITION ENDS, YOU WOULD CONSIDER ALLOWING OUR CONTINUING BUT THREATENED, UNLIMITED EXISTENCE . . . WE WOULD LIKE TO START BY THANKING YOU FOR RECOGNIZING OUR RIGHTS TO INHABIT AND EXHIBIT IN THIS SPACE AND FOR NOT LABElLING US “URBAN PESTS” AS MANY OTHERs DO. And we can change our phobias from arachnophobia to arachnophilia.” Earlier, in preparation for a new exhibition, Saraceno had sent an e-mail instructing staff members at the Shed, including docents, custodians, and curators, to preserve webs throughout the building he then tagged them with “an open letter for invertebrate rights”: “But we can stop booming them away! And we can admire their work. “Usually the impulse is just to remove,” she said. Nearby, Emma Enderby, the curator, looked under a stack of folding stepladders for more webs. “The spider is not there! But, when you see the spiderweb, you are seeing the spider itself.” “We’re looking at the body of the spider,” he said, illuminating a web spun by a member of the species Steatoda triangularis. “It’s so little, look!” An art curator handed him an iPhone with the flashlight on. Look!” Saraceno wore a blue sweater with light-blue running shoes and a KN95 mask he was covered in dust, and his eyes glowed with excitement. “Look, look, do you see it? There’s one here!” he yelped, on his hands and knees, as he peered beneath a wooden pallet in the loading dock. The artist Tomás Saraceno recently spent an afternoon in Hudson Yards, at the Shed, searching for spiderwebs. Tomás Saraceno Illustration by João Fazenda
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