Pimoa Chthulu – is the name for the leading fictional figure of a spider in Donna J. Haraway’s philosophy, modified from the name of an actual spider, “Pimoa Cthulhu”, living in California. Its name comes from the indigenous language of the Goshute people of Utah, Pimoa – big legs Cthulhu – akin to the powers of Chaos (similar to the power of Chaos)

In Haraway writting, she has changed second part and called it „Chthulu”, which comes from the word “Chtonic” – chthonic. It has its meaning from the underworld, nourishing all living things. In the form of pincers, plant roots and fungi.

Pimoa Chthulu by Donna J. Harway is the name for “elsewhere” and “another time”, which was, is and will be for Chthulucene. With non-human beings and plants, that is, looking for “Kin” not necessarily among people. There is now a pressing necessity to adapt to life in the ruins of capitalism, on a destroyed planet, to generate a respons – ability, that is, the ability to react, respond in a close relationship to all animate and inanimate matter of the world.

Matsutake tell us about surviving collaboratively in disturbance and contamination. We need this skills for living in ruins!  

So Pimoa Chthulu contains the whole underworld which gives life, feeds mushrooms, plants, animals and people, and is built on the principle of a network and connections. Everything is related to something, and this is related to something else. And death and life happen within these connections. She is a spider’s web.

The object has eight arms, eight legs, each cocoon-like, hollow and can be walked in and crawled around. Because it is almost impossible to navigate this web in any other way. The work is also accompanied by a video documenting the active use of the „octopus body” by eight dressed in it people. The crawling is in accompaniment of trance music created by Bartosz Zaskórski on the basis of a violin performed by Piotr Lutyński. The action took place in the premises of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, during the inauguration of the academic year 2024/25, at the invitation of the Rector, Prof. Andrzej Bednarczyk. The crawling bodies „polluted”, „contaminated” and took in possession of more than 130-year-old building that was the first Academy of Fine Arts in Poland.

In the project, I am interested in imaginary interpersonal networks, built in tension between the gestures of two, three or many people. In establishing new ecologies of coexistence.

To find volunteers for performative act I have made an open call among students. 

These structures connect us in love, hateful and toxic systems, their sticky threads cling to the body thrashing in the dance of life to death. Random-effect sequences do not necessarily follow one another clearly, something very surprising or rather nonsensical in our opinion happens again and again.

[Pokaz zdjęć]