There are multiple ways of relating to, interacting with, and knowing the world. By producing and validating knowledge mainly from mental frameworks and cognitive reason people dismiss the rich and multiple ecologies to experience the world in diverse ways. Currently, human understanding of knowledge is mainly rooted in linguistic systems that shape experiences, interactions, and ongoing knowledge production. That is why Donna Haraway’s (2016) insights are relevant: “It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems.”
The Enlightment and Industrial Revolution pushed forward conceptions that removed humans increasingly from more embodied, relational forms of knowing that were very central to our historical survival and becoming-with. David Abram (1996) mentions that “we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human” in the preface of his influential book The spell of the sensuous. Abram coined the concept of the more-than-human that has now been widely adopted in artistic research (and beyond). By perceiving nature as separate from us, we effectively cut off ways of knowing that can only emerge in constant dialogue with the living world. One could thus argue that humans have cut off parts of the multiplicity that the experience of living can be.
We share more-than human natural histories with what Haraway (2016) refers to as companion species. These natural histories as such are shared, entangled and intimate. The honey of bees for example likely played a crucial role in the evolution of the human brain, and their beeswax have been lighting ancient temples long before the rise of electricity. Other companion species, such as cows, were once part of everyday human life, and are now often raised in distant farms, sterile and without or minimal human interaction. As this multispecies becoming-with evolves, it unfolds beyond these material exchanges, into shared perceptual spaces that are co-constructed and interdependent. Each ecology has its own way of knowing, as Abram (1996, p.156) argues: “Oak, madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winter, fog off-shore in the summer, salmon surging in the streams - all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone.”
Spacemaking for multispecies encounters and becoming-with is an artistic coping mechanism for the ecological and meaning crises. It explores spatial interventions for kin- and meaning-making, while criticizing dominant ways of knowledge creation and validation, rooted in linguistic categorization that requires reductionism, only serving human-centric understandings of the world. “Some of us insist on feeling quite attached to the ‘human’, that creature familiar from time immemorial who, as a species, a planetary presence and a cultural formation, spells out specific modes of belonging” (Braidotti, 2013). This multispecies spacemaking explores resonances with the more-than-human instead. It provides room for collective being and storying in order to move away from these human-centered frameworks that shape our interactions and power related dynamics with other beings.
The first spacemaking intervention took place in the botanical garden of Ghent University Museum (GUM). This garden is public during opening hours, and organizes courses, tours and other events. During the Biodiversity Day in May 2024, the multimedia bee hotel opened. Constructed from reclaimed wood, the hotel welcomes a variety of guests, each with their own unique backgrounds and worlds. It serves as a space where both long-term residents and brief visitors interbee. The long-term residents are the wild solitary bees, who nest their future generations in the nesting tubes. The passerby is the human, drawn by curiosity, chance, or interest. Yet, the hotel remains open to unexpected guests, such as ants, butterflies, wasps, and more.
Attached to the side of the hotel is a screen with an opaque frame, leaving peepholes for visitors to look through. These peepholes resemble the nesting tubes of bees, which are usually too dark to see through. By looking at these tiny round screens, visitors are shown (a) animations that reveal the living environment of wild solitary bees, and (b) words that somehow remain ambiguous. These two elements raise questions and bring human participants into a space of speculative reflection.
On the one hand, the human visitor recognizes the living environment of the bee as its own. On the other hand, it is unclear who the narrator of these words is. While the bees are not literally speaking, the multimedia aspect of the bee hotel aims to give them a voice in the storytelling process. This approach allows the bees and their partners/collaborators (wind, flowers, pollen) to metaphorically ‘speak’ within the narrative, and should underline the bees’ agency within their living environment. In turn, this should encourage the human audience to contemplate the complexity and significance of the bees.
Even though wild solitary bees might be tiny creatures, their worlds are large, as they are part of a vast network of interactions, collaborators, and interconnectedness. It prompts human visitors to comprehend bees through the relationships they have with other living elements and processes. Visitors as such are meant to feel a slight sense of overwhelm from the diverse stimuli: the many colors, ambiguous words, and actual bees humming around. This provides an alternative way to resonate with the life of a wild solitary bee, beyond numbers, facts or scientific details.
Spacemaking for multispecies becoming-with as such, decenters the human, and creates space where humans once again experience that they are not separate from their environment, but in fact an integral part of it, like compost (Haraway, 2016). This builds on the idea of Rosi Braidotti (2008, p. 182), who proposes the primacy of life as zoe, or “the endless vitality of life as a process of continuous becoming”. Zoe is in contrast against bios, in which human-centeredness gets priority within broader socio-political structures. Shifting the lens through which we look at public spaces from bios to zoe, the very concept of public space begins to unravel. To frame a space as public, epicenters the human, neglecting other participants that co-create it: pollinators, microbes, mycorrhizae, ferals, or other lifeforms. In this way, the creation of the multimedia bee hotel becomes a space that contradicts the very space it is in. The hotel as such expands on Michel Foucault’s (1967) concept of Other Spaces, or the Heterotopia. By shifting the Heterotopian focus from human-centered spaces to more-than-human environments, we can encounter and interact with the habitats and realities of nonhuman beings. In turn, these perspectives mirror how humans can reimagine their own realities and physical manifestations in urban areas thereof.
The bee hotel in this sense provides space for perceptual frameworks to redefine human senses of attachment, connection and resonance to the multiple ecologies in urban areas. It is in the being-with that we can begin to sense what it means to become-with. The hotel is an invitation to extend our current knowing based on scientific data or the notion of bees preserving “our biodiversity”. It opens space for other ways of knowing through the very act of being in the encounter, the togetherness, and in resonance.
Acknowledgement
Many thanks to my supervisor, Virgilio Vasconselos, co-supervisor Sandy Claes, Dirk from Hou'tHart, Maakatlier Antwerp, Jan Grietens, Liselotte Van Daele, Johan Delcour from Fotorama, Chantal, Dominique, An, Olivier and Agata from GUM Ghent, Jonas Van der Slycken and LUCA School of Arts.
References
Abram, D. (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World. Pantheon Books.Braidotti. (2013). The posthuman. Rosi Braidotti. Polity Press.
Braidotti, R. (2016). The Critical Posthumanities; Or, Is Medianatures to Naturecultures as Zoe Is to Bios? Cultural Politics (2016) 12 (3): 380–390. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-3648930Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.
Foucault, M. (1986). Of other spaces: Utopias and heterotopias (J. Miskowiec, Trans.). Diacritics, 16(1), 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. New York, USA: Duke University Press. doi.org/10.1515/9780822373780
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.