This work comprises a multimedia installation and a speculative video game, the latter currently in progress. The first character of the game, the Beeseeker is introduced at the Progress Exhibition at ONX. While not playable at the moment, the viewer gets a glimpse into the game and the story, by browsing through the equipment, the talismans and the offerings in the character inventory.
The story begins with a cone-shaped basket, woven from branches and used from ancient times in various areas worldwide to host bees, that was given to the artist many years ago by an elderly woman she met during a hike on an island. The Beeseeker inherits the basket and after trying to learn as much as she can about it, she starts her journey in the Archipelago - a landscape ravaged by the climate crisis.
The Beeseeker is on a quest to find and communicate with a swarm of wild bees, believed to be extinct. Their disappearance, after millions of years on this planet, could be intertwined with a broader ecological collapse.
In the game and the story, the basket becomes a metaphorical starting point to explore ways of cultivating resistance and interspecies collaboration in a rapidly transforming world by performing acts of care and joy. Offering water to the bees or performing the bee round dance are some of these acts.
The title, Telling the Bees, refers to an old rural tradition found in various cultures, where people would inform bees of major household events, believing that failure to do so might cause the bees to abandon their home.
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A multimedia installation including the game, currently in development, was first presented in February 2025 in the group exhibition āPROGRESSā, the second annual Onassis ONX Exhibition in New York.
PROGRESS, the second annual Onassis ONX Winter Exhibition, brings together six artworks by ONX members that play against the forward march of time. Using multichannel video, spatial audio, custom software, games engines, machine learning, augmented reality, and sculpture, each of these works speak to intimate, domestic relationships with technology. Some of these artists describe themselves as tinkerers. Others find sentience in their software and an independent animus in their imagined worlds. Technology as a tool for product, or progress, disappears here in the studio. What emerges instead are looping rabbit holes of imagination, dream worlds, and new configurations of sociality.
Public Viewing Hours: 1-7PM, February 21-23 & February 28 - March 2, 2025
Featured Artists: Nouf Aljowaysir, Matthew Gantt, Kyriaki Goni, Lisa Jamhoury, Sarah Rothberg, Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou
Telling the bees as a multimedia installation was initially commissioned by Framer Framed for the exhibition āThe One Straw Revolutionā curated by Iliana Fokianaki (Framer Framed, Amsterdam, 2024) and further developed with a commission for the exhibition "the collective purr" curated by Nadja Argyropoulou (Nobel building, cultural space of the City of Chalandri, Athens, 2024)
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