Pollinarium

Pollinarium is an audiovisual installation that opens a door into the hidden universe surrounding a beehive through a cosmic lens.

At the heart of the work is an animated star map, where each pulsing point of light signifies not a distant galaxy, but a specific flowering plant in the landscape of the Maajaam art farm. It is a place where the precision of contemporary DNA analysis meets the ancient mysticism of the night sky, transforming the surroundings of a single beehive into an infinite and unexplored system. In this work, the bee appears as a biological research vessel, carrying out daily expeditions within a three-kilometre radius. What seems to us like an ordinary meadow is, for the bee, a complex and pulsating network—an essential navigation map shaped by millions of years of co-evolution. Pollinarium visualises this holistic and immediate way of seeing, which remains inaccessible to the human naked eye, bringing before the viewer a mystical landscape full of familiar and unfamiliar plants and connections.

The installation’s data is based on an in-depth DNA analysis of honey collected from a hive at Maajaam. Here, honey is treated as a concentration of nature—a biological extract of the landscape, a temporal trace, and a unique genetic archive. A single spoonful of this substance contains the code of the region’s biodiversity, preserving the memory of every flower and organism encountered along the bee’s journey. One spoonful can say more than a thousand words. Using simple geometry and the metaphor of the starry sky, the work transforms an imperceptible system into a perceivable journey. It is an invitation to curiosity: to see honey as a cosmic map and nature as an unknown planet we are only beginning to understand. Pollinarium is a bridge between science and dreams, reminding us that the connections around us are denser and more mysterious than we might first imagine.