GIFT/GIFT

While browsing a collection of old books one summer in my family’s house in Finland, I came across Kom Bara Lite Närmare (Just come a little closer), an illustrated Swedish nature book from the 1950s. In a chapter on spiders, it described a spider’s sometime habit of using its thread as wrapping paper to package its dead prey and present it to another spider. From this came the idea to spell out the word “gift” in a spider’s web. The meaning of the word in English is familiar, of course, but taken as a Swedish word (and Swedish is my first language), gift means “poison.”

The video begins with a scene of a spider in the middle of a web. Next, my tweezers appear and attempt to insert small letters made of red thread into the web, one at a time, to spell out capital G-I-F-T. An unusually aggressive spider counters by plucking out the letters, and a battle ensues between spider and tweezers for control of the web. Finally, the tweezers manage, with great difficulty and damage to the web, to insert the letters. The spider returns, picks out the letters in order, and makes a few small repairs before settling back into the center of the web with a shudder.