ArcHive of the Bees
by Lamisse Hamouda  

“Human relations to nature are not only ethical, but political”  

- Val Plumwood 

The bees arrived at the gallery in a custom-built hive with a glass front. The bees were housed in the best way to suit our artistic consumption of their lifestyle through being able to gaze upon them. The exhibition was an invitation to reflect, to consider our ‘collaboration’ with, and ‘our dependency’ upon, the bees. Through placing the bees in the gallery space, we were being invited to not only remember the bees, but remember how to live with bees.  

Yet, there was something off about including living bees in an art exhibition for the alleged purpose of reflecting upon dependency and collaboration. There was already a power imbalance, because the bees were brought here by a human who made a choice to reconfigure the bees as a display of art. After all, the bees didn’t choose to come to this gallery and set-up a glass-walled hive. They were chosen to be in the exhibition and a hive, specifically modified to human desires, was designed for them. That, by being in the exhibition, they were also subjected to our artificial rhythms of light after sunset, exposed to fluorescent glow by the glass wall that allowed us to witness their movements. A witnessing that was intended to provoke us into thinking about our life with, and without, the bees. Not to consider the bees’ life, but our own.  

Catherine Oliver states how the “busy industrious bee’s labour brings value not only to humanity, but to the continuation of the diverse, multi-species ecosystems and worlds around us. This has constructed their imminent loss as one to mourn not for them, but to us – for human ecological, economic and cultural survival.” It seemed to be that the exhibition was unintentionally engaged in a reification of our egocentrism, and separation from nature. Domination requires separation, and the dominator is egocentric; always more concerned with the preservation of their own position of power, than of the experience of the dominated, unless that experience threatened their life and security. Val Plumwood reminds us that this separation – and the dualism from which it emerges – is a Western cultural construction, one that is related to a long history of colonial domination and exploitation. It is also in this dualism that nature is seen as “passive, as non-agent and non-subject, as ‘the environment’ or ‘invisible background conditions’ against which the ‘foreground’ achievements of reason or culture take place.”  

Culture was taking place in this exhibition and the bee was the non-agent and non-subject placed within the gallery space to make an important and ‘moral’ cultural statement. Moral is written in quotation marks because it seemed ethical on the surface, but there were politics in which the exhibition couldn’t escape, despite its attempt at moral appeal to collaboration, a word that sought to flatten power imbalance that existed between people and the bees. A subtext dominated the exhibition, one that also served as a reminder to the unnamed power we held. The bees were here so that we, the human, could face our climate-shame. Our dependency on bees had only become visible through the news of the bees' demise. Maan Barua highlights how the kind of ecological labour done by “the little things that run the world” are largely invisible as it’s “largely contingent upon an organism’s quotidian rhythms and ethological propensities” and how it is “in their demise or absence that effects of hidden ecological labours… are felt.”  

In the first few days of the exhibition, the bees died en-masse. An employee of the gallery took out a vacuum and sucked up their tiny, clustered corpses, cracking jokes about the “bee massacre.”  

I wanted to know why bees had died, and died in clumps. It seemed like a cruel irony, that an exhibition designed to remind us to save bees had killed a bunch of them. I had seen the bees, in bundles of two or three, rolling past my feet as I stood in the alleyway. I ruminated on this, imagining the bees as deeply committed to the collective until the end, as though they all lived by a ‘no bee dies alone’ policy. As it turned out, forcibly moving bees and placing them inside new, unfamiliar hives often leads to an increase in bee deaths. Apparently, they die from the stress. 

I wanted to assign agency to the bees, but I wanted to do it without personification of needing to see the bees as extensions of myself, or projecting my emotional world onto the bees. But, I didn’t know how to think of bees without relating it to myself; I found myself wondering, do the bees mourn death? Could the bees be cognisant of their own demise and exist in states of collective grief? In the death of the bees in alleyway, instead of seeing it as an inevitable outcome of moving bees, could it be their collective protest to interference? A stress-based reaction to the domination we have imposed over their lives by choosing to move them? You cannot collaborate with something you dominate. It is us who fooled ourselves into thinking this exhibition was a way to befriend the bees, but it seemed to me, that perhaps, the bees were not so fooled. 

Yet, not all bees died. Many of them continued with their lives, flying around collecting pollen and returning to their display hive. One day, I gazed unashamedly upon the hexagonal wax patterns of the hive, bringing my face as close as possible to the glass without touching it. It was filled with quivering bees, crawling through the maze on missions beyond my understanding. A self-consciousness crept over me as I realised that there were people milling about the alleyway, and I found my fingers itching for something to do. I felt embarrassed by the child-like curiosity that the bees had sparked in me, for I – after all – was a socially conditioned adult like any other. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and filmed the bees for a 9-second clip that I uploaded to Instagram. The bees were archived in the extension of my memory: my phone. Later, I rewatched the clip I had uploaded to Instagram. By watching the video I could remember the feeling of curiosity and wonder. But I wasn’t experiencing actually experiencing the emotion, just the memory of it. The small archives we created every day in our devices, a collection of files of our memories as images.  

Little did I know, that I wasn’t the only one filming the bees.  

A few days later, I came back to the alleyway. The hive was visibly buzzing with bees but something looked strange. There were no bees in the alleyway, they were all in the hive and their size seemed somehow distorted. Then I realised that what I was looking at was not bees, but a flat-screen television installed into the hive playing footage of bees in a hive. I got closer. A black plastic rim was visible around the edges of the hive, and on the bottom strip was silver print: “KOGAN.” I couldn’t believe it; the bees had been replaced by footage of bees! I asked around at the gallery. As it turned out, a patron at a nearby restaurant had been stung by one of the bees. The restaurant owner complained to the gallery, saying that the bees were harassing his customers and disrupting the appeal of his alfresco dining setting. 

“It was only inevitable someone would be stung by a bee and complain,” said the employee.  

I found myself flying down multiple thought patterns in response, and instead of articulating any of them, I nodded and said, “yeah, of course” and extricated myself from the interaction. Despite all my critical reflection over the exhibition, I had still thoroughly enjoyed it. It was only in the presence of this display hive and its buzzing inhabitants that I realised how absent bees actually were from my daily life. But the video looped like a kind of sinister vision of a future of techno-archives, of the digitisation of nature. As thought our impulse to save nature will not be to change our ways, but to find innovative ways of capturing nature before it disappears. It would be to make nature a digital memory. To reduce nature to pixels, gigabytes and code seemed like a reasonable extension of the colonial logic of control and domination, and an inevitable outcome of the era of technological dominance. It would be footage for virtual reality in order to answer to the desire to revisit what nature was. Thus, the natural world, in the process of ceasing to exist in our physical space, will be subsumed and captured by the virtual space. 

The supreme dominator upon all living organisms continues to be the capitalist logics of profit accumulation. The bees, despite being made into products for the purposes of ‘meaningful’ art, had adapted to their new environment and found a way to continue their quotidian life in the gallery. Their value was in the fact that they drew eyes to the exhibition, eyes which were carried in bodies which could access wallets that were then used at the gallery bar and cafe. Within this nexus, the bees bought in profit and were permitted to die, mate, fly and pollinate regardless of the sudden squeals of surprise from patrons who found bees on their shoulders or in their hair. When the bees turned from profit-generating to profit-threatening creatures, all the collaboration and care that the exhibition had exhorted us to consider was exposed as a facade; a sort of green-washing that posed as a moral provocation, but existed within a framework that reified the precise processes that continue to harm nature. As such, the bees were immediately removed. To potentially lose profit-generating customers was a greater sin than losing bees. After all, the restaurant owner had the law on his side protecting his rights as a small-business owner. It was what Murray Bookchin called a “sobering reminder that the real battleground on which the ecological future of the planet will be decided is clearly a social one, particularly between corporate power and the long-range interests of humanity as a whole.”  

We say we love bees, but I think we still love them abstractedly. We like our bees to be harmless, to labour without being seen. To be symbols of climate catastrophe and our imminent destruction, as well as life-generating, honey-dripping vassals of joy and wonder. Without politicising our relationship to nature and investigating the legacies of domination we’ve inherited, Plumwood recognises this dominance as that which “threatens to ultimately produce the most irrational of results, the extinction of our species along with many others.” 

It seemed to me that for the bees to exist, they must actually cease to exist. If the bees’ demise was as inevitable as their deaths after moving, their removal after disrupting business — then the only outcome can be to record and store them in a digital memory, all so that profit-accumulation can continue uninterrupted while surrounded by politely potted plants and tasteful alfresco seating. As I stared at the video of the bees, I thought: “there’s no way it can end like this.”  

Lamisse Hamouda is an author, creative producer, workshop facilitator and Art Therapist in training. Lamisse is Australian-Egyptian and currently living in Vienna. Lamisse is currently in the middle of writing her first book, a literary memoir about the political imprisonment of her father in Egypt in 2018. Her book will be published by Pantera Press.

References 

Catherine Oliver, More-Than-Human Precarity, Anarchist Essays Podcast, 2020  

Maan Barua, Animating Capital: Work, commodities, circulation, 2019  

Murray Bookchin, What is Social Ecology?, 2007  

Val Plumwood, Feminism and Mastery over Nature, 1993