Telling the bees, 2024-ongoing

Telling the Bees is an ongoing project unfolding through installations, sculptural objects and an experimental art game. Combining research and speculative storytelling, it explores bee communication, collective orientation and relationships of care between humans and other species.

The story takes place on an Aegean island in a near future shaped by ecological change and overtourism. A young woman—the Beeseeker—inherits a traditional bee basket called a smarologos. She repairs it using local materials, adds a ceramic guardian, and sets out to find the last wild bee swarm and form an alliance with it. The project takes its title from the practice of “telling the bees”: sharing significant household events with bees, acknowledging them as members of a community whose lives are intertwined with our own.

The installation brings the Beeseeker’s world into physical space through the smarologos, ceramic forms, drawings, found images, sculptural equipment, video and augmented reality. These elements function as tools, companions and traces of her search, bringing local materials and practices into dialogue with speculative technologies. Repairing the basket becomes an act of care, connecting her journey with questions of ecological loss, extractive tourism and the continuity of island life.

Telling the Bees (The Game) extends this world into an open-ended, exploratory experience. Players accompany the Beeseeker through an island landscape, encountering traces, obstacles and other beings as they search for the swarm. Her equipment—including the smarologos, ceramic eyewear, an antenna and improvised tools—opens different ways of navigating and sensing the island. Listening, observation and acts of care shape the journey. Bee communication and collective intelligence inform an exploration of how a game can create space for tenderness, curiosity and interspecies encounters. The game is currently in development.