Talking Heads

Bärbel Rothhaar, Apis Regina / Osmose, 2007, Installation

My friend artist Bärbel Rothhaar is currently taking part into a collective exhibition at the Georg-Kolbe Museum in Berlin, "Tierperspektiven" (animal perspectives), before travelling with her work to the Umweltbundesamt in Dessau and then to Montreal, Quebec: since many years she's especially interested in combining her own artistic pieces with a kind of unpredictable process, resulting from placing, like in this case, some small wax-heads into a beehive, letting the bees building their own cell-structures all around. No need to say that every time the results are surprisig, since considerable part of the final, unique piece is out of the artist's control.

For this site-specific installation the visitor can see this process through a glass-pane, looking directly into the beehive: even for those who cannot visit the exhibition there is a webcam streaming during all the exhibition's time.

Related posts:

-Strategy for integration of beehives, Detroid, Michigan

-Spatial Limits vs. Temporal Limits

Spatial Limits vs Temporal Limits

Photo by blacque_jacques

Bees sometimes decide to move out and found a new beehive, because the old one is become overcrowded and too big: but when is the right moment to do that? No one knows, insofar; I think they just feel it.

A beehive, by the way, can leave theoretically forever.

So, a beehive has a spatial limit, but not a temporal one. It cannot grow without boundaries, but it can reach eternity.

It is the same for the city? If so, the concept of the “megastructure” (in this link very interestingly "reloaded"), of spatial unlimited expansion just crumbles. It is vital the liminal space between the city and the non-city, whatever it is, and the medieval town model comes therefor strongly to our minds.