Who, as a child, has never played the solitary demiurge, arranging figurines and characters in a makeshift theatre? Who is this person manipulating the shadows in a disused factory where there’s barely any daylight? With El espíritu de la araña, making worlds and making a film find an identity of their own in a flexible adventure flowing organically between the qualities of the shots, the blurring and sharpness, shadows and reflections, image-making techniques and iconographic collections. And all this in a radical silence that brings the living creature closer to the animal world. Antonia Rossi’s camera accompanies rather than observes these actions of creation, everyday rituals in the hushed atmosphere of this abandoned and ostensibly hostile place. Its inhabitant makes a kind of lichen grow, and covers herself with it – a literal way of taking root. Sprouted seeds become a landscape in which a hand, filmed in close-up, slides like a futuristic slug. El espíritu de la araña is the unfolding of a mutation via the experimental fabrication of a different way of living. Living like a spider. The outside is spied on and kept at a distance. This dichotomy constructed with an interior is less a separation of space than of time. Urban visions could be the ruins of a before, and this interior, another form of ruin (here industrial), a future as an opportunity to reconfigure images and symbols, and produce new narratives… and therefore new worlds. The cinematic space is, then, the ideal place for the Chthulucene (a name whose first source is a small Californian spider) to occur, a parallel space-time invented by Donna Haraway, where “the possibilities of living in the ruins of capitalism” are gingerly created, precious, secret possibilities that are constantly threatened by the destructive appetite of cranes. Claire Lasolle