Araneus diadematus examines the practice of scientific specimen cataloging and display. Museums, like cemeteries, are institutions where bodies are classified and exhibited. They frame death as a form of knowledge. Though museum archives stabilize cultural memory, violence is regularly their precondition. Specimens often result from extermination, and the dead become useful tools in institutional aims. Araneus diadematus employs the visual language of the museum and Western burial practices to frame the battered body of a cross orbweaver spider.

 

By borrowing these formal conventions, the work foregrounds the uneasy intimacy between scientific examination and funerary gesture. In doing so, the work underscores the tension between reverence and control, highlighting how acts of preservation are also acts of possession. Araneus diadematus challenges the ethical distance that determines which forms of life become objects of study and utility, and which are afforded the privilege of mourning. The piece encourages viewers to reconsider how institutional frameworks assign value to certain bodies while rendering others disposable. Through this lens, the work becomes a critique not only of natural history display but of the broader systems that shape our collective
relationship to death, care, and ecological responsibility.