In the natural apiary

Humanity became the major geo-shifting force on the planet. The current epoch of the Anthropocene sadly affirms our disrupting engagement with the more-than-human world. The rates of endangerment among mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and insects, are overwhelming. Scientists have declared that we are living through the sixth mass extinction, although this piece of news is mostly unheard and unnoticed in our daily lives. Extinction as the backdrop to human life. Gradual and out of sight. A violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space. A violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Among the multitudes of agents enmeshed with us in multispecies relations, the position of Apis Mellifera, the honeybee, is instead highly visible. The honeybee is meaningful to us because our food production system is significantly dependent on their ecosystemic service of pollination. In my cinematic multispecies project, against the indifference of the sixth mass extinction’s slow violence, I imagined the bees as the sensorial protagonists of the film-world. I imagined them buzzing, flying in and out, filling the moving images with their life presence. I envisioned to be able to express their positive vitality through their own lively agency as it appears in the film-world.