I invited a queen bee to establish her colony on the rooftop of my home. This alliance was sealed through a ritual-performance in which I offered the hive a mask of my face. The face, considered a liminal site, interrelates mind and body; feeling and reason; the individual and the collective. Over the course of two months, the bees finished the sculpture, covering the mask with wax, honey, and propolis. The piece, created through multispecies collaboration, embodies porous and permeable bodily boundaries and challenges the rigidity and validity of binaries such as culture/nature, inside/outside, human/animal, and self/other.

Mujer Apis is an art project in collaboration with Apis mellifera bees. Through various media, like performance, sculpture, video, sound, and photography, Mujer Apis invites intimate and hopeful openings toward multispecies presence and responsibility, prompting reflection on the interrelations that shape and sustain our world.

Detail of mask inside the bee hive, 2022. Photography by Pistor Orendain.