Faculty of Arts & Science

Visual and Critical Studies

Amaaya Dasgupta

Celestial Spider Light Worlds

Making a world/fabulation by merging spiders and light in symbiosis. Based on ideas by Donna Haraway, Kim De Wolff, Elizabeth Grosz, and Stacy Alaimo

“Those spiders whose architectures are multi-dimensional, the theridiidae, knitting light string into sympoietic fabric worlds of temporal and spatial suspension. Light traveling from the stars that elucidate space and illuminate time, the theridiidae feed on the supernovae and stitch new lifeworlds from death and grief - they build with sustained remembrance as the light entanglements of these world fabulations twinkle with star-ghost material. Knitting breath into light as they inhale and exhale, growing dimmer and brighter, dystopia adjacent - how a single stitch can cause darkness and dread in luminosity and life. The inherent contingency of self-defined worlds is thus exaggerated here while simultaneously being inconsequential, as time comes to an end and the deathwebs of these lifeworlds are suspended in timelessness. Time, as it exists in light, light as it is knit into webs, webs as they are stitched by the theridiidae - time is no longer linear or directional, it is tentacular - time is spatial and space is temporal. The light from the stars comes from the past and is knitted into the fabric of the present while the futures of utopias weave into their current as well, and thence they go shedding all time, as the spiders begin their shedding too. The theridiidae begin their molting as they eat the dying starlight and outgrow their exoskeletons – cocooned in their own luminous webs, they lie in the clutches of light. Pulsating chroma, now cradling its maker, feeding it light energy as it molts and grows and breathes and changes – as its cocoon morphs into its new outer skin, the theridiidae now, luminous too. This sympoiesis symbiosis that comes from decay and renewal, lifeworlds from death and grief, lifewebs of deathworlds. As our self-defined worlds collapse and start becoming with the celestial, the theridiidae finds its nourishment in celestial light and celestial star light thrives as it is knit into new worlds by the spiders. They create each other as they become anew, they each become anew yet remain the same, but to each other they are different, metamorphosed/ing. They find mutual creation and destruction in one another and generate light thread that is knit into new world fabric. Everything is stitched with starlight, everything is connected to each other with string, everything is weaved into one another, nothing can exist without the other, nothing can change/grow/die/renew in isolation, nothing is truly autopoietic; as lifeworlds shift and breathe and move in and out of deathworlds, while deathworlds drift and decay and move in and out of lifeworlds. The spiders and starlight create fabulations of preexisting and non-existing life and death forms, they fabulate worlds of fabric made of star flesh and spider exoproteins that live in endless cyclical and timeless, tentacular and spatial, anarchitectural and structural worlds. Knit with grief, living alongside death, interconnected with life and breath, memories living contemporaneously, the theridiidae and the starlight are makers of other/outer/interworldly fabulations that live and die constantly, timelessly, together. ”