Eco‐visionaries (25/05/2019 – 29/10/2019) presents twelve national and international artistic positions that explore the new connections between the biosphere and the technosphere, the latter marked by the imperative presence of the human being on a planet of limited resources.
It is precisely these relationships that the exhibition debates, through a selection of aesthetic and conceptual approaches, utopian narratives and counter‐models to share with a wide audience.
Eco-visionaries interrogates how architecture, art and design react to a rapidly changing world beyond mainstream sustainability notions. Karin Ohlenschläger co-curated with Sabine Himmelsbach and Yvonne Volkart. Eco-visionaries toured internationally from MAAT in Lisbon, over HeK Basel to Laboral in Gijón.
AnneMarie Maes presents the installation BEE AGENCY.
BEE AGENCY is a dynamic project of interrelated organic and bio-technological processes. It is living art, it is a system developing in harmony with its environment.
The departure point for AnneMarie Maes’ work with swarms of bees is the endangerment of this “intelligent super-organism,” which responds to environmental influences, like bio indicators. The guerrilla hive is a bio-art project developed in cooperation with researchers, which partly functions in real life and is partly speculative. Manufactured from microbial skin and bacteria that register environmental influences and respond to it, it is meant to provide protection to the bees. The video Variation Games condenses one year of audio-visual observation which was made with an infrared camera and contact microphones in a beehive. The images show us that the bees’ coexistence is based on “decision-making, networking, collaboration and collective intelligence”.
El trabajo que AnneMarie Maes realiza con enjambres de abejas toma como punto de partida el peligro de extinción de este “superorganismo inteligente”, capaz de responder a influencias ambientales, actuando como bioindicadores. Esta colmena guerrillera es un proyecto de bioarte, desarrollado en cooperación con varios investigadores, que funciona en parte en la vida real y, por otra parte, en un plano especulativo. Fabricado a partir de pieles microbianas que registran las influencias ambientales y reaccionan a ellas, la instalación tiene como objetivo proteger a las abejas. El vídeo Variation Games condensa un año de observación audiovisual, y fue realizado con una cámara infrarroja y micrófonos de contacto en una colmena. Las imágenes dejan claro que la coexistencia de las abejas se basa en “la toma de decisiones, el trabajo en red, la colaboración y la inteligencia colectiva”.
En colaboración con / In collaboration with: Free University Brussels (VUB), Fablab Barcelona, DIYBio Barcelona, Open BioLab Brussels, JRC Ispra.
Cortesía de la artista / Courtesy of the artist
laboralcentrodearte.org/eco-visionarios
works on display in the installation BEE AGENCY (2016-present)
– Intelligent Guerrilla Beehive (speculative sculpture, 2017)
– the Urban Bee Laboratory (research and development in material science, 2016-ongoing)
– Variation Games (video b/w, 2018, 21’59”)
– Alchimia Nova (video color, 2019. 10’37”)
– Glossa – Bee Tongue, 2018 / Stimuli – Dust Particle, 2018 (Scanning Electron Micrographs (SEM)
– Disrupted Sensations (4 lightboxes with microbial skin compositions, 2019)