Bee Time Sociedad Cooperativa Andaluza

Bee Time residencies provide conditions for living and working together over a period of two weeks in order to communally enter an intimate space of research. We are a core team of three artists and we invite others to join our living explorations within an expanded sense of time inspired by the bees, what we know as Bee Time.

The natural history of the honey bee is so wide-ranging that visiting artists who spend time with us usually find an attraction to a particular aspect of bee biology, social behaviour, relationship with the landscape or as subject of veneration. Participants then begin following a thread of investigation to develop their artistic process. Many times this process touches on very personal themes due to the intimate nature of our work together. Ideas are shared in the group, worked and reworked by a collective ‘digestive’ process. As a result, everyone ends up participating to a lesser or greater degree in the creative process that is gestating in each one of us.

Since 2015, when we set up a natural beekeeping learning community in the La Janda area, we have been putting into practice the question 'How do we want to live and work together?'. We consider the work in the apiaries, the interactions within the learning community and the residencies with the visiting artists all an integral part of our collective artistic process, our social sculpture.