UC San Diego

The process and research that led to The Community Bee Clinic—a radical veterinary practice and multimodal, participatory art project consisting of an interactive gallery installation, along with narrative documentation of individual honeybee rescues. Ultimately, this project culminates in an exhibition where visitors are invited to become emergency caregivers for starving and hypothermic honeybees. Through the use of interspecies nursing care and speculative biomedical objects, non-human bodies and ecologies are engaged in

new ways and at new scales. These objects, methods, and documents involve the appropriation and re-imagining of the concept of a medical clinic—an avant garde veterinary practice reconfigured for invertebrate patients. Situated within the realms of speculative design and social practice, the Community Bee Clinic explores themes of vulnerability, urgency, intimacy, and agency. The interdisciplinary project also functions as an experimental application of research on apian physiology, perception, and stressors, invoking issues of environmental health, interdependence, and non human socio-ecologies. Integral to the work is the notion of hybridity: both the physical clinic installation and the project documentation operate to blur the lines between art and science, human and honeybee, fact and affect, audience and participant, pedagogy and play, and expert and lay knowledge.