Aero.sol – shelter. An apiary for the Inland Village 2021
4-channel sound, silkscreen prints
In collaboration with Antropoloops, Jaime del Corro, students of architecture of Konstfack Stockholm lead by Sergio Bravo
Produced within the framework of ”la Caixa” Foundation’s programme to support artists
This installation benefits from the generous support of [N.A!] Project
Commissioned for Rethinking Nature
Courtesy of Inland – Campo Adentro, in collaboration with Antopoloops
Fernando García-Dory brings together art and agroecology to provide alternative strategies for ecological action and rural revitalization. He founded INLAND in 2009 in Spain to collaboratively rethink the relationships between rurality and culture. The project commissioned for ‘Rethinking Nature’ draws on INLAND’s ongoing activities in northern Spain and on ideas of inter-species collaboration and care. The multi-sensorial work features a soundscape in which the sound produced by bees, the frequencies of which have curative properties, is intertwined with a choir of women engaging in the traditional practice of ‘telling the bees’: murmuring to the bees about deaths in the beekeeper’s family in order to avoid further loss. The installation celebrates the restorative properties of bees, in line with the symbiotic ecosystems projects that INLAND is developing in the village in the Cantabrian Mountains in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, where new apiaries and a healing shelter have been constructed to protect bees and let villagers access their beneficial qualities. On 3-6 March 2022, a module of the Inland Academy, a new postgraduate programme focused on rurality, art, and strategies for collective learning, will be presented in Naples as part of ‘Rethinking Nature’ before culminating at documenta fifteen, Kassel, in June 2022
Artist statement
This artistic proposal for Madre is part of a broader project that involves the creation of that apiary and cabin as a space for healing and meeting of knowledges and species. Inspired by apitherapy spaces and hermit cells or monasteries, it uses the healing and restorative powers of the beehive. One hour of rest in the environment restores more energy than 8 hours of conventional sleep according to recent studies. The favourable conditions are the result of a combination of factors, such as the aromatic vapours of the wax, honey, pollen and propolis that the hive exhales, the micro-vibration and sound frequency of the bees’ buzzing, the stable physiological temperature of the hive and the ionisation of the air. For this presentation at Rethinking Nature, INLAND proposes a sound installation around the idea and tradition of “tell the bees”. In the peasant cultures of Northern Europe it was customary, when an important event took place in the house, to gently knock on the honeycomb and whisper to the bees what had happened. The piece developed for this installation imagines this interior as a sound experience. It brings together recordings from the apiary, an ethnomusical archive of agricultural labour songs and female voices from the choir gathered in Campo Adentro. Accompanying it, a tryptic of posters including poems by the artist, combine medieval representations of beekeeping in monasteries and diagrams from bee ethology studies.