The Non Urban Garden, a collaborative project between Kunstvereniging Diepenheim and the ArtEZ Professorship Theory in the Arts, presents among more: If Bees Are Few... a commissioned work by Jimini Hignett (DAI, 2010) and Doris Denekamp (DAI, 2011)
Jimini Hignett and Doris Denekamp's work If Bees Are Few... deals with the alarming decline of honey bee colonies and consists of an installation in the public space of Diepenheim plus an artist publication.
The first part of If Bees Are Few... is a sculptural work in the landscape – a row of beehives, two of which are inhabited by bees and buzz with life, the others, their companions, are silent, fossilised. These other (five) hives have been cast in concrete and form a kind of burial monument for the honeybee. The row of hives will be situated on a 'terp', a raised mound of earth, and surrounded by a meadow of flowering plants which are useful to bees, either for their nectar or their pollen, or for bee well-being.
The second part of If Bees Are Few... is a publication (in collaboration with Swiss designer Anna Haas) which together with the hives, is the 'Non-Urban Garden'. The book propagates the story of the bee. The project's title forms the premise for the book – what if bees die out, what is lost if bees are no more? Not only in the practical sense – the pollination of plants, the consequences for food and the economy – but also in the imaginative or symbolic sense – bees having had such a prominent place in mythology and legend, etc. As the book should encompass not only the past and the present in terms of bees, but also the future, the artists have asked the British author Simon Ings to write a fictitious story relating to the idea – If bees are few...
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The opening of the The Non Urban Garden at Kunstvereniging Diepenheim is on the 10th of May 2014.
The other commissioned works that will be presented as part of The Non Urban Garden are projects by the artists Birthe Leemeijer, Jeroen Kooijmans and Edward Clydesdale Thomson.
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