Super-organism
Penelope Cain, Barbara Doran, Kath FriesOpening night: 5-8pm Tuesday 15 October
Exhibitions continues: 16 October - 2 November
Super-organism is a multi-media, multi-sensory project by Penelope Cain, Barbara Doran and Kath Fries, exploring pattern finding and self-organising systems. The term super-organism is usually used to describe an interdependent social organisation where individuals are not able to survive by themselves for extended periods. Classically this term is applied to insects, but we are reinterpreting it more widely in relation to human/human and human/nonhuman relationships, across ways that we negotiate the interdependence of individuals and the collective nature of exchanges systems. As the anthropocentric world has become increasingly digitalised and interconnected, expanded notions around super-organisms as a mode of being are becoming increasingly relevant. Our Super-organism project will play out as generative and responsive evolving conversations, beginning with an interest in honeybees as a typical super-organism and an indicator species of ecological change. This expands into creative engagements with human systems of economy from an individual and colony perspective; to systems of information exchange, from the analogue of speech and wing-vibration to digital networks. Our Super-organism project will involve ‘Telling the Bees’ a series of participatory conversations and honeycomb drawing sessions with the artists and gallery visitors, using handmade beeswax crayons. As well as panel discussions with invited guests.
Image: Barbara Doran, Bungonia Honeycomb, 2017, digital photograph
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