Hearth Hive Installation
This project grows out of the field of social biomimicry. What social technologies can we learn from nature how to shape our society and cultures - after all, nature has a 3.8-billion-year head start in research and development. So we might as well become nature’s humble apprentices.
More concretely, Hearth Hive is a mythological reimagining: what advice would bees give us about transforming our societies? What secrets would they hum about life, caring for each other, mending our estrangement from nature? How would they react to human inventions like the patriarchy or turbo-capitalism? And how would such a story be different from the typical mythological hero’s journey we have all digested so many times? Maybe it is time for new myths to be written not in reverence to sky gods, detached from our world, but emerging from the wisdom of a superorganism that lives in the very midst of our lives.
THE RITUAL ROOTS
Since the Middle Ages, rural families of Central Europe and the British Isles engaged in a ritual practice called “Telling the Bees”. It involved approaching bee hives to softly speak or sing important news of change and emotions to the bees.
The ritual is rooted in the belief that bees are messengers between worlds. They were thought to wield the power of sustaining life due to their role in pollination and to keep nature’s wisdom when gathering nectar.
Beekeepers treated their bees with reverence, and as extended members of their own family. So telling their bees of moments of joy and sorrow was a way of witnessing transformative times and strengthening their relationship with nature and their more-than-human kin.
ARTISTIC ADAPTATION
Hearth Hive features elements that build on this old ritual:
A fable, performed as an oral storytelling circle.
An interactive installation, linked to the story.
A tyrannical king. An exhausted people.
A brave girl. A magical beehive.
The nectar of dreams.
The honey we feed to each other.
The alchemy of change.
THE HIVE INSTALLATION
A hive. A heart. A hearth space.
People enter. Hushed voices. Soft light.
A glowing honeycomb in the middle.
Shaped like an oversized anatomical heart.
The sound of a pulsating heart emanating from it.
Interspersed by the soft humming of bees.
Cables flowing from the veins of the heart to microphones.
People whisper into the hive heart. Their voices are recorded and are later played to the bees.
The harmonies that the bees produce in reaction to it, get woven into a more-than-human poetry and music piece.
NEW YEAR’S RITUAL
The collected whispers from the Hearth Hive installation were played to the bees on the last night of 2024 in a New Year’s Ritual.
All the wishes, songs, confessions, prayers, thoughts and dreams people recorded inside the Hearth Hive filled the night air around the hives in the window of time between the old year and the new.
The bees listened and shall carry all of them forth into the world as they emerge from their hive in spring.
Hearth Hive has been developed by Angelika Lauber in her role as “Ritual Alchemist” for the Austrian Regional Hearth Summit. It is part of an award-winning three-day gathering happening all over the globe by the Wellbeing Project. It brings together thousands of changemakers to advance a hopeful vision of individual, collective and ecological wellbeing for all.
Hearth Hive has been exhibited and performed for the first time for the Art of Change Summit in Alpbach, Austria on 11-14 November 2024 and remains an ongoing art project.
