The installation Bee Agency stands at the intersection of art and ecology, inviting viewers to witness the culmination of years of research into the life of bees, their habitat, and their potential as agents of environmental intelligence. The project began with following question: can we create a refuge for bees that is both natural and conducive to their complex social life, while also considering the pressures of modern urban environments?
Bee Agency: A Journey into Collaborative Coexistence
In my earliest work, I sought to understand the bees from the inside out, approaching their hive not just as a passive observer but as an active participant in their world. I was captivated by their intelligence, their collaborative ways of living, and how each individual bee contributes to the larger superorganism of the colony. This led me to create specialized beehives in urban spaces—experiments that gave the bees a chance to thrive outside the constraints of traditional beekeeping practices. These custom-built structures, designed to encourage natural hive behavior, became my laboratory.
At the heart of my inquiry is the idea of the beehive as more than a mere house for bees; it is an interface between nature and technology, between human and non-human intelligence. From this exploration grew the concept of the Intelligent Guerrilla Beehive — a project that addresses the critical decline in bee populations by introducing beehives that act as both sanctuary and monitor. These structures are embedded with technology to track environmental data, offering insights into the health of the bees and the broader ecosystems they inhabit.
As I dove deeper into the ecological and political dimensions of this work, it became clear that bees were not just the subject of my art, but collaborators in its creation. The bees became agents of their own story, shaping the way I approached my art practice. Through this symbiotic relationship, I developed a series of sculptures and installations that highlight the importance of cohabitation and cooperation between species.
In creating Bee Agency, I envisioned an environment where the bees could take center stage—not only as symbols of environmental fragility but as living entities with agency. The installation invites the audience to reflect on the intelligence of bees and their crucial role in the ecosystem, while also challenging us to reconsider our relationship with nature. Can we develop more sustainable and harmonious ways of coexisting with other species? Can technology aid in this endeavor without dominating it? By examining the bee’s place in urban landscapes, we gain a new perspective on how art can intervene in ecological crises. The Intelligent Guerrilla Beehives represent not just a technical solution to the decline of bee populations, but a vision for a future where art, science, and ecology come together in an act of mutual care and resilience.
___________
De Intelligent Guerrilla Beehive is het resultaat van jarenlang onderzoek op de snijlijn van kunst, wetenschap en biotechnologie. Het begon met een eenvoudige vraag: hoe kunnen we een natuurlijke schuilplaats voor bijen creëren die niet alleen veilig is, maar ook technologisch geavanceerd genoeg om het gedrag van de bijenkolonie te monitoren zonder de kolonie te storen? Dit onderzoek leidde tot een installatie die zowel functioneert als een schuilplaats voor bijen als een bio-sensor om de gezondheid van het milieu te meten.
Door te imkeren in stedelijke gebieden heb ik – in samenwerking met biologen en ingenieurs – een beehive ontwikkeld die is afgestemd op de noden van de bijen, in plaats van op die van de imkers. Het concept van de Intelligent Beehive kwam tot stand om het gedrag van bijen in de stad te observeren. Bijen zijn krachtige bio-indicatoren en weerspiegelen de gezondheid van hun omgeving. Mijn artistieke onderzoek ging dieper in op de kwetsbaarheid van bijen en hun ecosystemen, met de bedoeling een groter bewustzijn te creëren over hun bedreigde status door vervuiling, pesticiden en verlies van habitat.
Ik doe mijn veldwerk in het Brussels Bee Laboratory, het openluchtlaboratorium van 750 m² op het dak van mijn studio. Hier gebruik ik biologische en technologische tools zoals sensoren, microscopen, en data-opslag in de cloud om bijen te observeren. Uit deze waarnemingen ontstaat de artistieke productie, wat heeft geleid tot projecten zoals de Intelligent Guerrilla Beehive. Deze innovatieve bijenkorf heeft een dubbele laag van biologisch materiaal dat is gegroeid door bacteriën tijdens een fermenteringsproces. Deze ‘bacteriële huid’ beschermt de korf, en functioneert tegelijk als sensor die de vervuilingsgraad van de omgeving visualiseert door middel van kleurverandering.
Het proces van de ontwikkeling van deze levende huid is een voortdurende verkenning van de mogelijkheden van biotechnologie en biomimicry. De huid wordt gevormd door Acetobacter xylinum -bacteriën die cellulose produceren, en wordt vervolgens verder opgebouwd met biofilms van bacteriën die gevoelig zijn voor vervuiling en bij aanwezigheid daarvan een reactie vertonen. Deze technologie stelt ons in staat om de interactie tussen de bijen en hun omgeving te monitoren en te begrijpen.
Door het gebruik van natuurlijke vormen, zoals pollen en planten, en digitale technologie, zoals 3D-printen en het werken met de Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), wordt de Intelligent Beehive een hybride kunstwerk dat zowel functioneel als symbolisch is. Het stelt vragen over de manieren waarop we kunnen samenwerken met de natuur, hoe we technologie kunnen integreren zonder de natuurlijke processen te verstoren, en hoe we samen kunnen bouwen aan een duurzame toekomst.
Met de Bee Agency-installatie toon ik de kracht van samenwerking tussen soorten, en de potentie van kunst om een brug te slaan tussen ecologie en technologie. Het nodigt het publiek uit om na te denken over de rol van bijen in ons ecosysteem, en hoe we, door beter samen te werken met de natuur, bij kunnen dragen aan een duurzamere wereld.
________
WHY LOOK AT ANIMALS
Why Look at Animals? is a major international group exhibition that will include over forty artists and extend over three floors of EMST, the museum of contemporary art Athens (from May 2025 to March 2026). The exhibition is inspired by the seminal 1980 text of the same name by John Berger, which explores the animal-human relationship during modernity and how animals have become marginalised in human societies. The exhibition raises the urgent issue of the necessity of defending non-human life, which is largely ignored or disregarded by politics, business, and agriculture, highlighting the highly problematic aspect of our predominant practice of dealing with animals as commodities and products. It aims to expose the exploitative violent mechanisms of systemic animal abuse, rendering the shameful invisible visible. The exhibition will explore not only the idea of animal rights, but also the question of animal sentience, aiming to start a much necessary discussion about the systematic injustices that animals suffer at the hands of humans but also acknowledging animals as not separate from – but an integral part of our biosphere and ecosystems. Climate change, industrial ‘factory’ farming, war, destruction of natural habitats all have a dramatic impact on animals and their habitats. If we want to talk about climate justice, animals form an integral part of the discussion.
The creatures with whom we share the planet suffer at our hands and part of the reason for this is the misconception that they are separate from us. As modernity advanced, our proximity with animals receded. As Berger pinpointed, in the beginning, animals “were with man at the centre of his world”, whereas in the last two centuries “they have disappeared” from our view and proximity. In the meantime, animals became something we saw at zoos, circuses, on television and in the entertainment industry, and as packages on a supermarket shelf, another product disconnected, in our consciousness, of its origin and the reality of its life and death. The dominant anthropocentric view that characterises modern societies has rendered animals as invisible, silent, a secondary species and not an integral part of our interconnected ecosystems. Animals became product, machine and spectacle all at once. From bullfighting to fox hunting, the illicit trade in exotic animals, to the unbearably cruel practice of industrial rearing of animals, the discussion around animal rights, their capacity to feel and to experience pain needs to become more urgent. Descartes’ idea of the bête-machine (animal-machine), which compared animal behaviour to that of machines rendering them unable to think and not possessing consciousness, has been disproved. In the early twentieth century, the establishment of the field of neuroethology, which explores the sensory worlds of animals and the neural basis of animal behaviour, has scientifically proven that animals are not input-output automata.
In 1975, Australian philosopher Peter Singer published a book entitled Animal Liberation, exposing the harsh realities of life for animals in factory farms and testing laboratories and provided a powerful moral basis for rethinking our relationship to them. Fifty years on with the climate crisis at our doorstep and species disappearing at alarming rate, his thesis is even more urgent. The EU’s Protocol on Animal Protection recognises animals as sentient beings (rather than as property which is how they are regarded in the US) and requires countries to pay attention to animal welfare in their legislation. But in most cases, theory is far from practice. Though there have been some advances in terms of animal welfare and in factory farming practices in the EU and some parts of the world, the reality for most animals in captivity is dire – that is why images depicting the appalling conditions animals are kept in, in most cases, are well hidden from public view. China, for example, has massive factory farms and lacks any national standards for raising animals for food. The US is not much better, as Jonathan Safran Foer exposed in his book Eating Animals, which raises questions regarding the ethics of food. The philosophy of animal rights, raised by individuals such as Singer, Foer or Jane Goodall, aims to reverse this objectification of animals, elevating their formal status from being considered as something to being considered as someone, a thesis also underlying this exhibition.
Probing the issue of estrangement between humans and animals and the alienation of the latter from their natural environment, the exhibition centres of the lives and experiences of animals, aims to draw attention not only to their tragic plight in the hands of humans but more importantly to encourage discussions about the urgency of acknowledging animal sentience and animal rights, which are gaining currency, if albeit too slowly; and generating awareness that the protection of animals should be held to a value that is equal to that of the value of humans. This is not only a question of looking at the animals as a separate category worth defending per se, but a vital ecological concern that is inextricably intertwined with environmentalism and planetary wellbeing as a whole.
Katerina Gregos, Artistic Director, ΕΜΣT Curator of the exhibition