The work presented above is a series of prints, where I photographed human social scenes recreated using beeswax and dead bees. The starting point for this work is scientific, coming from the work on crowd behaviour and social constraints in conflict I have described in my book “Attracted to conflict, dynamic foundations of destructive social relations”.
While the widows of Srebrenica, people fleeing their homes, lost and fragile in an hostile land are images of pain, hopelessness, and maybe some kind of relief, rarely do we have the space and conditions to reflect on this. We became somewhat immune to the experience of our social condition, and the suffering of others, what Susan Sontag described in her reflections on photography.
In this series of photographies, I transform the perspective on photography of crowds by transgressing the individual – the human – to another social animal, bypassing our defence mechanisms towards human suffering. I also play with scale: in these big prints, the bees gain a human dimension.
Paradoxically, you see more of the human, of the existential condition of the individual in the crowd when the medium is altered from the daily newsfeed to a distorted setting involving rescaled, humanised bees. The recipient starts to interact perceptively with the photography, looking for signs of humanness in the bees: a particular inclination of the body, of the head, the way bees are seeking proximity and warmth from neighbouring bees, how some are isolated -maybe lost- in the crowd.
social tissue #1 / dead bees on beeswax
social tissue #2 / dead bees on beeswax
social tissue #3 / dead bees on beeswax
The work presented above is a series of 4 pieces, recreating patterns of crowds and social events with the use of dead bees on beeswax. The effect I want to achieve is one of patches of a new tissue, the social tissue, like fragments of skin, that have been ripped of and displayed in a laboratory. In this work, I extract the social from the human, and present it in a new form, somewhat as a fragment of flesh, of organic matter. The elements of the tissue recreate a perpetuated social code; here, in social tissue #1, this is the code of social gatherings in prayer. From afar it gives the impression of an old page from a very old book. The bees are aligned as people in communion, attending a mass. The bees are taking a spot within the beehive (recreated from natural beehives). The beehive matrix is the same for the whole series of social scenes prepared as social tissue #1, #2, #3, #4. The idea of social code comes from my scientific work, where I spent more than a decade, looking for the algorithms behind human crowd behaviours. We discovered that the code is very simple, but it leads to emergent complex social phenomena. Similarly, I retraced this by assembling the praying crowd, repetitively, one bee at a time, in an almost meditative process.
les veuves #1 / photography, 120x80 cm
les veuves #2 / photography, 120x80 cm
migrants #2 / photography, 120x80cm
execution #1 / photography, 120x80 cm
praying #1 / photography, 120x80cm
praying #2 / photography, 120x80
miners #1 / resin and charcoal
footprint #1
In this work, I used empty beehives and recreated them with the use of coal and epoxy resin.
This is an abandonned habitat, drifting on a black shinny surface. The beehive resembles a burned boat, drifting on dark water, caught in the moment before drawning. But it is also the footprint of a former habitat, a whole history of community, care, social life that vanished into the sea.
I created this piece when I was working with young refugee girls that had to escape from their home with their families via perilous sea routes. As a refugee child myself, I came back to the experience I had, 35 years ago, when we had to flew our cosy home overnight. At that time, I had recurring dreams about empty beds and empty homes. These girls, in turn, also referred to a particular relationship with their home, their beds, and the boats that brought them to Europe.
In these sculptures (a series of 8), I wanted to convey a number of aspects inherent to the experience of exile and displacement: you leave your primary matrix, the structure from which you were born, your community, your network of care, your bed, your homeland. There is also the aspect of burning, of reverse transformation from lively, shinny and warm ground to the dark matter of abandon, death and extinction. While beeswax beehives are lively structures that are constantly recreated by generations of bees, their transformation into coal signals an end process. In this sense, forced displacement and exile means that you will not have a chance to continue the generation chain, to contribute back to your community. It is a somewhat unnatural and painful ending. Bees extinction from this perspective is humanised and linked to the basic experience of loss.
This is an abandonned habitat, drifting on a black shinny surface. The beehive resembles a burned boat, drifting on dark water, caught in the moment before drawning. But it is also the footprint of a former habitat, a whole history of community, care, social life that vanished into the sea.
I created this piece when I was working with young refugee girls that had to escape from their home with their families via perilous sea routes. As a refugee child myself, I came back to the experience I had, 35 years ago, when we had to flew our cosy home overnight. At that time, I had recurring dreams about empty beds and empty homes. These girls, in turn, also referred to a particular relationship with their home, their beds, and the boats that brought them to Europe.
In these sculptures (a series of 8), I wanted to convey a number of aspects inherent to the experience of exile and displacement: you leave your primary matrix, the structure from which you were born, your community, your network of care, your bed, your homeland. There is also the aspect of burning, of reverse transformation from lively, shinny and warm ground to the dark matter of abandon, death and extinction. While beeswax beehives are lively structures that are constantly recreated by generations of bees, their transformation into coal signals an end process. In this sense, forced displacement and exile means that you will not have a chance to continue the generation chain, to contribute back to your community. It is a somewhat unnatural and painful ending. Bees extinction from this perspective is humanised and linked to the basic experience of loss.
