by Marcello Dantas - Curator - SFER IK Museion

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One of the most important challenges of our time is to create a dialogue with other species.The question is: can we use our creativity, science, and technology to improve our ability to learn and cooperate with other creatures? Art is an excellent platform to experiment with those possibilities. The work of Marlène Huissoud is about her interaction with bees. She has spent her childhood with them and learned from observing and collaborating with her father, a beekeeper, the particularities of the life and language of bees.

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As she became an artist her work expressed the aesthetics and ethics of collaboration observed for so long and began to create architecture for bees to occupy. Ancient knowledge from the Mayan culture about bees and its human interaction are still present in Mexico through medicinal uses, healing practices and spiritual connection.

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Marlène Huissoud was fascinated by the specificity of the Mexican native Melipona bees and created Mama, a sculpture made in collaboration with AZULIK Workshops using local materials, such as cow dung, cactus wax and soil. The sculpture is integrated with the SFER IK Architecture and the jungle that surrounds it. Hopefully the bees will live gradually closer to us, occupying the sculpture. We may learn something from that experience, inspired by the ethic of collaboration observed by the artist.