HONEY

At Forgan Arts Centre

For the first edition in May 2023, we explored the secrets of honey. The invited speakers were Dr Cath Keay, Clement Boucherit, and Dr Rita Valencia.

Dr Cath Keay is a Dundonian Artist and Lecturer at DJCAD, whose practice focuses on sculpture and architecture as two ways to explore form and materials. She has worked with marine biologists, farmers and beekeepers to create collaborative artworks with farmed animals or so-called ‘pest’ organisms. During her Helen Chadwick Fellowship at the British School at Rome, she employed colonies of bees and ants to examine Italy’s legacy of interwar Colonia Estiva architecture for children.

Clement Boucherit of the East Neuk of Fife Bees started their career in business development for farms and in agriculture in France. He moved to Scotland in 2014 and has been keeping bees here since 2016, while having other projects in the agri-food area. Since 2020 he has been a beefarmer.

Dr Rita Valencia is a researcher on Melipona’s Native American Bees and a Fellow at the University of Glasgow. Rita is an activist scholar born and raised in the Mesoamerican highlands of Mexico City. Moving across disciplines (literature, agroecology, anthropology, and political organising), she sits uncomfortably in the existing boundaries that divide ways of learning, knowing, and feeling. She was politically formed by the Zapatista uprising and the National University (UNAM) student strike of 1999-2000. She has studied and worked in India and England, and since returning to Mexico in 2010, has worked with and for indigenous communities in different capacities in Chiapas, Oaxaca and the Cauca region in Colombia. She has just completed her PhD working and learning about the relationship between native bees, territories, and different ways to resist and re-exist in the midst of the Capitalocene/Plantationcene.