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The Mambila people of Wester Cameroon practice a form of divination that Argentinian conceptual artist, Tomás Saraceno, finds deeply interesting. This particular divination—the seeking of future or unknown knowledge by supernatural means—is known to the Mambila people as Nggàm. With Nggàm, the diviner observes and interprets the actions of spiders or crabs, then translates their wisdom into answers for those who ask.

Saraceno tells me about this form of divination just a couple of weeks before his largest US exhibition yet, Particular Matter(s), opens at The Shed in New York City. Levels 2 and 4 of The Shed feature a survey of the artist’s past work, while his new work, “Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web” dominates The Shed’s 17,000-square-foot McCourt space. The installation, 95 feet in diameter, features two floating webs that emit subtle vibrations derived from—or ‘conducted by’—air particles, and of course, Saraceno’s favorite eight-legged friends. “You ‘hear’ a very tiny vibration on this net when you are laying down,” remarks Saraceno, when asked about the ‘aural’ element of this installation. “In this case, it’s about feeling an inaudible moment, right?”

Inaudible, yes. Beyond this, Saraceno deals with the ineffable—grasping at something that has yet to be imagined. “Galaxies Forming along Filaments, Like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web”—his breakout work at the 2009 Venice Biennale— introduced many to his fascination with spiders’ web-making and the answers the act might illumine for how an increasingly depleted world can survive. Those black rope webs, like the source material of which they are based, seem to transfix and entangle the viewer—and continue to appear throughout Saraceno’s work, expanding into the present at The Shed.

Indeed, over the years, Saraceno has listened to what the natural world begs for, and offered his solutions. In Saraceno’s Aerocene, a collaborative project, he brings together scientists, engineers, and volunteers to create the artist’s answer to flight. Balloons traverse the skies with no fuel at all, only to be lifted by the power of the sun.

The ‘hearing’ in this new piece, Saraceno says, is less of an aural experience, and rather one inspired by the ways spiders navigate the world. These (most often) blind and deaf arthropods’ limited senses force the senses they do have to be amplified. “The best way to hear the concept,” continues Saraceno, “you really have to lay down, open your ears, touch the web, and try to perceive these very, very tiny frequencies. And that’s how spiders have been recording, for many years, all these vibrations. And then we are able now to reproduce them on a human, and let’s say, an escape from the body.” Perhaps an escape similar to that of the truth-telling arachnids of Cameroon, empowering us humans to reach for the heavens’ sacred knowledge?

Running concurrently with Particular Matter(s), Silent Autumn opens at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, which presents new works from the artist. Upon entering the gallery, visitors are met with An Open Letter for Invertebrate Rights. The proceeds from the letter, as well as that generated by nggamdu.org, will benefit the Mambila people of Somié, Cameroon. After visiting the village, Saraceno set up the portal for participants to ask questions of diviner, Bollo Pierre Tadios, who turns them into answers from spiders. Saraceno remarks that, “instead of me only recording and telling a story that does not have an economical retribution based on knowledge,” he instead makes an effort to honor those who have granted him access to that knowledge. “Somehow, many cultures keep profiting without really directly unfolding all of the knowledge that would be next to keep extracting.” The buck must stop at some point—the buck being adorned with the haunting grins of colonialists and autocrats.

For Saraceno, it seems this inability to fully access so much knowledge transcends class. Those in power with the means to obtain knowledge diminish its maximum potential by failing to share it and respect its origins, and those whose power is suppressed are guarded from gaining knowledge. “If we can grow with solidarity, and if we can grow with many other things,” says Saraceno of the conundrum power structures create for progress, “then yes, we can grow.”

Solidarity—this word crawls through Saraceno’s work. Much like the diviners of Cameroon, Saraceno looks to spiders, and to the natural world, for answers. And much like the diviners, he shares this knowledge with the community. For Saraceno, perhaps the widest divide is not in the inequality we can physically observe, but rather between that which we can perceive, understand, learn, or not learn from. That which we can hear—from our elders, from our teachers, from our neighbors, from the spider breathing gently in the corner of our ceiling.