Bee Boarding School

The Bee Boarding School gathers bees, artists, neighbours, and mediators to converse about art, ecology, alternative economies, and multispecies forms of education.

It will open in the beginning of September 2024, inviting eight international media artists to an intense exchange on the Katzenwedelwiese, an orchard close to the Karlsruhe city center. Since the ZKM exhibition “Critical Zones”, the orchard has become a potential space for the connection of media art and ecological practices. In cooperation with ROEM Institute (ID), School of Mutants (FR/SN), and the local citizen associations of Bulach and Beiertheim, the Bee Boarding School also invites the Karlsruhe public to experimental interventions developed by the artists.

Working as tandems, the participating artists will imagine a series of artistic interventions taking place on the Katzenwedelwiese, potentially in the form of a sound performance (Yussan Ahmad Fauzi, ID, and Lukas Marstaller, DE), an experimental object workshop (Edi Hidayat, ID, and Hanna Jurisch, DE), a ceramics workshop (Aldizar Ahmad Ghifari, ID, and Oliver-Selim Boualam DE/MA), or a collective walk (Elgea Balzarie, ID, and Mira Hirtz, DE). This experimental curriculum for both meadow inhabitants and neighbours will open with a tea ceremony, engaging all the senses by tasting different types of honey from Karlsruhe and West Java, listening to the bees, and smelling tea blends made on-site from leaves and plants from the meadow.

The international, long-term project explores the intersection of media art, ecosystems, permacircular education and economies and develops a curriculum for both meadow residents and neighbours. The Bee Boarding School aims to foster an in-depth exchange between artists from Jatiwangi/Majalengka and Karlsruhe and to establish a long-term collaboration with project partners from the Global South (Indonesia & Senegal). The project also seeks to notice the Bulach orchard, a biotope that relies on neighbourly care, and connect with the local citizen associations. The artists and project partners are united by their relations to bees and ecological contexts, as well as their shared inquiry into how media-artistic engagement with alternative educational and economic models can contribute to a 'permacircular' (Verlet-Bottéro) future.