The artwork is informed by the archaeology of beekeeping, that is, the ways in which humans have been relating to bees, developing methods and constructing structures to harvest honey. The ceramics draw on the artist’s research in apiculture traditions before the introduction of the wooden hive. Up until 1852, beehives were diverse in form and materials. Early examples made of straw, clay and fired ceramics were used in Africa, the Mediterranean region and the Middle-East, and are still used today in different parts of the Global South. In Belgium and Northern Europe beehives were usually baskets (skeps) made out of rye straw, sewn with reed, or wood - material that was readily available in the area. Often, they were decorated in idiosyncratic ways that reflected cultural beliefs or their owners personality. The introduction of the standardized wooden beehive meant a halt in this diversity spanning 4.000 years, albeit making honey harvesting easier, as a productive and profitable activity.

In bringing together a multiplicity of ceramic beehive shapes from various historical and geographical contexts, Firesong for the bees, a tree of clay acts as a kind of ‘repository’ that ‘re-pollinates’ the city with forgotten iconographies, technologies and architectures of apiculture, beyond the dominating modern paradigm. Between a display structure and a critical device, it invites to reflect on the human-non-human interdependencies and labour shaping the human-bees relationship to this day. Bees are the most important pollinators in the eco-system, but the ecological crisis is causing a significant decline in bee populations world-wide. The work asks us to think not only about artefacts becoming obsolete, but also about the extractive human-led processes that lead to species extinction. It is an invitation to sense and learn from the noises, smells and histories of the collective more-than-human intelligences that make the work.
In the bee-friendly city of Bruges, the artist collaborates with Biesous/ Margot Hinnekens and Uther Smis, an initiative of young bee keepers from the region, who care for the bees during the five months of Spaces of Possibility. The project is done with respect to the bees' wellbeing and the biodiversity in the park and the city. They will continue to take care of the bees after the end of the Triennial, when the artwork will be dismantled. Some of the elements of the structure will be donated to the apicultural circuit in Bruges, continuing their lives in the region.

Text: Sevie Tsampalla

Floor piece consisting of 45 concrete tiles, based on Penrose tiles, which conform both a pattern and an ornamental map.  Symmetrical shapes such as rectangles and triangles can cover a plane with neither gap nor overlap, and in an ever-repeating pattern. Repeated patterns are called “periodic” because even if you move a pattern from place to place, it looks always the same. The British mathematician Roger Penrose tried to imagine a set of tiles that could be used to cover an infinite plane in a pattern that never repeats. To be precise, he was interested in “aperiodic” tiling, a set of tiles that could cover an infinite plane, without the tiling pattern ever repeating itself. That was a challenge because he couldn’t use tiles with two, three, four, or six axes of symmetry—rectangles, triangles, squares, and hexagons—because on an infinite plane they would result in periodic patterns. That meant he had to rely on shapes believed to leave gaps in the tiling of a plane—those with forbidden symmetries.

Tiling based on a pentagon was thought impossible, a forbidden symmetry, but in the early 1970’s, Roger Penrose discovered that a surface can be completely tiled in an asymmetrical, non-repeating manner with just two shapes based on phi, now known as “Penrose tiles.” What is special about Penrose tiles is that even though he derived his tiles from the lines and angles of pentagons, his shapes leave no gaps. 

Several things attracted my attention during the visits to the Noord-Hollands archief and the city of Haarlem, but there is a constant, which can be compared to what Svetlana Alpers defines as “The Mapping impulse in Dutch art”.

It is not a coincidence that The Dutch were the first ones who produced maps as wall hangings and probably the first jigsaw puzzle (from a map). This shows only a part of the wide production, dissemination, and use of maps throughout the society. Mapping in the 16th century was a common, even a casually acquired skill. Each man made at least a single map in a lifetime. It seems to have been an accepted way to pay one’s respect to one’s home while contributing to the knowledge of it.

The Noord-Hollands Archief, and specially the Atlas section, contains a vast collection of maps, engravings, photographs and other visual material.After going through the cartography collection, it is striking to see how the countries landscape has been changing throughout the centuries. This development has two faces: the actual transformation of Dutch geography, in an attempt to gain land; and from the other hand, the quick development of cartography since the 16th century.