The Wild + The Tender

Wild bees, often regarded as the inconspicuous sisters of honeybees, find refuge in hidden corners such as holes, cracks and crevices, where they carefully create small breeding cavities for their offspring. Inspired by the fascinating world of wild bees, the current exhibition Aladin Borioli . Bannkörbe at C/O Berlin invites participants to get involved in a workshop at the interface of art and bee science.

In a creative process, participants will design one or two individual nesting faces out of clay, which are not only aesthetically pleasing but also serve as vital nesting sites for this special species. Under expert guidance, the ceramics will be fired after a drying period of two weeks and can then be collected from C/O Berlin.

As part of the workshop evening and as inspiration for the design of the nesting aids, participants will have the opportunity to visit the exhibition Aladin Borioli . Bannkörbe and learn more about the connection between bees and art from curator Veronika Epple and the Moabees workshop leaders.

No previous knowledge is necessary. Materials and tools will be provided. Please bring suitable clothing for working with clay and, if available, a used small kitchen knife as your own modeling tool.
 

Elisa Dierson, Bärbel Rothhaar and Katja Marie Voigt are the Moabees. The group of artists and beekeepers was founded in Berlin in 2013. Moabees brings together practices from the field of bees, nature studies, imagination and playful research in art processes. The result is new artistic perspectives on bees in urban society. The Studio Moabees project apiary is located at ZK/U Berlin.

Elisa Dierson works along the contact zones of visual art, natural phenomena and public air/spaces. In art projects, she cooperates with experts and children, with insects and institutions. Since 2012, she has been developing structures and spaces for collaborative artistic action in Berlin and has been involved in various exhibitions, art projects and art actions, including Moabees as part of documenta fifteen.

Bärbel Rothhaar is a painter and conceptual artist and studied fine arts at the UdK Berlin and the Whitney Museum ISP in New York. In addition to painting, drawing and sculpture, she has been working artistically with natural processes for around 20 years, in particular with bee colonies. Objects made of wax are inserted into the beehives – often human faces that are built over and altered by the bees. In her installations, the work of the bees can be followed either live in a showcase or as a video installation. Projects and exhibitions have taken place in Montreal, New York, Dakar, Buenos Aires and Sydney, among others.

Katja Marie Voigt's fields of work are art in public space, cooperative arts and artistic research. She studied architecture and art in public space at the TU Berlin and the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. Her work focuses on making life, nature and interpersonal phenomena visible and multimodally tangible through art actions and artworks. Her artworks contain meaningful components and convey consequences for future action.