Video still “Hive inspection #3 GoPro June 22 2019”
Bee Roll
The Hangar, Centre for Digital Media. Nov. 19-23, 2019. 10 am – 6 PM.
Bee Roll is presented by the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective in partnership with the Centre for Digital Media and Josh Miller. Bee Roll foregrounds the work of bees and humans on the unceded territory of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Two bee hives have been installed on the roof of the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver, B.C. The hives are sponsored by a game developer, Truly Social Games, which uses office space for research and development in the adjacent building.
Bee Roll is a media installation comprised of two videos: a live stream video of the bees at work on the roof above and a pre-recorded video documenting a routine inspection of the hives. Filmed by Josh Miller with a GoPro camera against the Vancouver skyline, the beekeeper, Garrett Kean, opens up each hive and checks the well being of the bees and their brood.
In our final year of exhibition, the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective invites visitors to join us in contemplating ends and beginnings in the terminal city. Bees, threatened with extinction, are inextricably linked with the future of human food systems and planetary emergencies. Corporate entities are hastening bee colony collapse by producing chemicals that kill bees and promote monoculture; bees are also cultivated as essential labourers in industrial farming and as wild pollinators the world over. The bees in these hives have been imported from New Zealand, potentially displacing local wild bees. In the context of the capitalocene and colonial extractivism on the edge of the Salish Sea, come sit with a view of the bees on the roof above you. Send a message to one of your relations on a specially designed “Greeting Card for the Anthropocene”.
The terminus is the end, the boundary, and the border. It is also a beginning, its own place, a site of experience and encounter.
Greeting Cards for the Anthropocene. Photo Craig Campbell.
Greeting Cards for the Anthropocene. Photo Craig Campbell.
The Ethnographic Terminalia Collective thanks Josh Miller, Richard Smith, Dennis Chenard, Reese Muntean and the Centre for Digital Media; Truly Social Games, and Garrett Kean; Greeting Cards for the Anthropocene.
