Organic Perceptions “Gemme la Natura perfin nella tomba, e il suo gemito vince il silenzio e l’oscurità della morte.”, thus laments Ugo Foscolo at the thought of the transience of life and its fatalities, which bring the extinction of the body, that perishes and tends to be annihilated by the sheer force of nature. Nature watches with an impassible eye the misfortunes and wanderings of the ontological mind enclosed in a material body that asserts his fulness of life in a short span of time, encapsulated in a clepsydra, that counts irrevocably, inexpugnably the temporal passage.

Alchimia Nova. Avant Propos. Anne Marie Maes est une artiste que l'on peut rattacher au genre art et science. Elle développe depuis de nombreuses années un travail qui s'appuie sur la recherche scientifique, la biologie, l'étude des micro-organismes d'une part, les sciences numériques et la passion du jardinage d'autre part. Dans son jardin à Bruxelles, elle cultive les plantes qui lui servent de matière première pour ses expérimentations, elle installe aussi les ruches qui lui permettent d'étudier le comportement des abeilles.

New Alchemy by Anne Marie Maes: The need to cultivate our Garden. Artist and beekeeper Anne Marie Maes, fascinated by bees for more than two decades, deals with the close interaction and coevolution between these insects and urban ecosystems through artistic research practices and in collaboration with scientists and engineers. Her projects involve complex relationships between living organisms and objects manufactured with biotechnology within the «postdigital paradigm», in a world where technology is completely intertwined with all facets of our existence.

Pairs Work Better than Singles. In 2008, AnneMarie Maes and her collaborators installed several hives on the rooftop of Okno (Russian for ‘window’), an artist-run space in an old industrial flour mill on the west side of the Brussels canal. A year later, she installed two more hives 400m due east on the roof adjacent her studio. Urban beekeeping had not been practised since the 1950s, so potential beekeepers faced huge learning curves. Her primary focus was to observe the bees to see whether they might meet up with bees inhabiting Okno’s rooftop garden.

BioIntelligent Beehive as Architectural Data. For most of the past decade, Annemarie Maes has been growing, hacking, digitizing, building, and thinking about beehives — particularly those in urban areas. Her constructed, prototyped, and grown hives are not immediately recognizable in classic forms of basket or wooden-box apiaries. Collaborating with a team of biologists, she is reconceptualizing what a beehive is and what it can be. Through the beehive she is addressing urban ecology, politics, and social systems. In this sense, what she builds or grows is recognizable as belonging to the realm of biological growths, found in nature and culture, and known in theory as animal, extended phenotypes.

On Growth and Form. AnneMarie Maes is fascinated in the processes by which Nature creates form: how bees create honeycombs in the hive, how they self-organize into swarms, how plants grow and form geometric patterns, or how bacteria and yeast collectively create material surfaces forming biofabrics. She observes and analyzes these processes, isolates them, or causes them to appear in artificial conditions , and then creates art works from this artistic research in many different media.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin … On the need for gardening To approach the work of AnneMarie Maes, an artist working with art-science projects that evolve around nature and ecology, it seems apt to use notions of ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze) or ‘knots’ (Ingold), alluding to respectively the bees and the rhizomatic growth of her garden, but equally to the new networks she continually ads and develops.

Another Kind of Paradigm: Art as Practice, Art as Research. The Brussels based artist AnneMarie Maes has created an ecosystem in front of her apartment on the rooftop of a parking garage, with several hundred square meters filled with vegetables, salads, herbs, bushes, small trees and other plants grown in wooden containers, and also including several so called “intelligent beehives.”

Politics of Green Spaces. Contemporary art practices that investigate the role of urban political economy and private-public property relations in the social production of green spaces, we may classify under the umbrella of the Politics of Green Spaces. Such art practices do 'not just create a new aesthetics' but literally get 'involved in patterns of social, scientific, and technological transformations'.