Art and nature merging into a fascinating work of art

The bees and their astounding creative power

Ana-Maria Cononovici, 28.09.2021, 14:00

We got used to enjoying, quite all right, special
activities staged by the Hateg Country UNESCO International Geopark Parc, for
quite some time now. The Geopark has special
geological elements of interest on offer, as well as other elements, no less
interesting archaeologically, historically and culturally. Starting off from
the dinosaurs that were discovered in Hated Country, unique around the
world…the geopark is a territory of national and cultural values. The geopark also has a long-lasting development
program; also, it is a brand offering a travel in time, to the history of the
Earth, which is 4.6 billion years old. One of the most recent projects carried
at the Park has the bees at the centre. Cristian Ciobanu with the the Hateg Country UNESCO International Geopark Parc,
affiliated to the Unioveristy of Bucharest, gave us the detail

Cristian Ciobanu:

We, at the Geopark,
have quite a few topics we’ve been working on. We’ve got « The Time of the
Man », the Time of the Earth, geology that is, we’ve got tourism we
need to take care of, the education of the generations to come, while this
projects somehow caters for all our areas of interest. Its title is the Super
Hero Bee. 100 million years in the service of the environment. The title is
quite self-explanatory. The topic we’re dealing with is a sensitive one, as we speak,
the condition of the bees, which is not quite satisfactory.

Here is Cristian Ciobanu once again, this time
offering us an outline of the outcome of the project, which is quite tangible.

What we see today is an artistic
installation, it is something innovative, a mix between art and the
environment, it’s about artist Dragos Neagoe’s installation labelled
Cohabitation, which can be found at the Geopark’s Centre for Sciences and Art
in the commune General Berthelot commune. There, the artist created a structure
on which he placed a family of bees. Dragoş Neagoe is also a bee keeper. And
that family of honeybees, which was especially raised for that particular kind
of thing, meaning that it was used to living in an environment which is
different from the beehive proper, keeps on building, it completes, it adds up
shapes to the creation of the human artist. So, man and bee, they work
together.

Beekeeper and sculptor Dragoş Neagoe started off from
the reality whereby a great many families of bees die especially at the time of
rape and sunflower harvesting, because of insecticides and pesticides. As an
artist, Dragos Neagoe took a stand, so in 2019, at the Mogosoaia Palace, he
mounted a small exhibition on that topic, in the hopes that the bee, which is
about to become extinct, may not end up being an exhibit in a zoo. As of this
summer, at the Geopark, that installation has been placed a stone-carved human
face, enriched and refined by the work of the bees that found shelter there.
Here is Cristian Ciobanu once again, this time telling us what the bees are
doing in the geopark, as we speak.

Cristian Ciobanu:

They prepare themselves for the
winter, which means the project enters its final stage, the bees, initially,
had to be removed to a hive, but I don’t think we will be doing that any more,
but we will set up a shelter for the winter, for them, right, there, on that
very structure. The structure can also be viewed on;line, we have alive web
cam, functioning there permanently, Yiou can view on the site of the geopark,
as geopac.ro.

As for the man-nature communion, it turned out to be
more efficient than the creators themselves of the installations had expected.

Cristian Ciobanu:

Bees work faster
that we thought. They have already got hold of the wall of the sculpture,
pretty tight. And they grew. If you watch that on the live web cam or if you
come to the Geopark yourselves, you can see how beautifully the bees can build,
they do that naturally, with no constraints from the hive. We usually don’t see
what the bees do inside the hive, we only get a glimpse of what they do when we
take out a honeycomb frame, we can see they are very busy, but here, you can
have the chance to see what happens inside the beehive, it’s as if we had a
transparent beehive. We want the project to last as many years as possible,
we want our little bees to continue their work, they may even develop, so they
can play more roles in this structure. So we’re not stopping here. The project will
carry on, that’s for sure, all the more so as it is part of our art-related
interest, around the park. It is somehow a continuation of the Land Art camp we
had in 2019. There are several installations we have here.

The sculpture and the bees, in their day-to-day life,
cohabit. And that created a kind of hybrid art. It has an educational purpose,
also promoting the Geopark and the Hateg Country. And to that end, organizers
seek to promote the natural, the cultural and the social values of the local communities,
as well as the strengthening of their identity.

(Translation by Eugen Nasta)