Together with a swarm of multidisciplinary collaborators, ‘Hiving and HUMing’ explores alternative methods and modalities of apiculture that centre bee logics and sensibilities.
‘Hiving and HUMing’ is a long-term, process-oriented multisensory project by visual artist Dunja Herzog (Switzerland) and beekeeper Thembalezwe Mntambo (South Africa) exploring the relationship between bees, plants and humans. Central to the project is the idea of ‘swarm logic’, a collaborative methodology for working together with a range of local and international beekeepers, gardeners, artists and academics to research and cross-pollinate ideas about indigenous and non-extractive approaches to beekeeping and beehive modalities, as well as sound and resonant instruments that tune in to bee vibrations and non-verbal forms of communication.
The project was supported by a Co-creation grant and unfolded in several phases over an 18-month period between 2023 and 2025.
Germination
Hiving and HUMing emerges from a collaboration that began during Dunja’s 2022 residency in Johannesburg. Having worked with beeswax for copper and bronze casting and as a sculptural medium, Dunja was interest in learning more about bees through the lens of her long-term artistic interest in the intertwining themes of mythology, healing, the resonance of materials and mineral extraction. This led to a serendipitous meeting with Thembalezwe, who for his part, was shifting away from conventional extractive, production-focused methods of beekeeping towards fostering a deeper relationship with bees, guided by sensitivity and consciousness of their presence and nature.
Together, they began exploring alternative forms, materials and processes for hives and beekeeping to the commercial square Langstroth hive, which was introduced to Southern Africa by Western missionaries. The collaboration brought together shared interests in materiality, building, environment, sensitivities about vibrations and joy in collaborating with others. Additionally, bees and beekeeping became a metaphor though which to consider questions about access to land and resources in South Africa as well as broader socio-economic histories of extractivism and colonialism, and by extension, the complexities of artistic collaborations between Europe and the Global South.
The collaboration took form through womb-like ceramic vessels and accompanying sound installation, resonating bees’ multidimensional significance and symbolism in mythology, folklore, spirituality, fertility and nature. The sculptures, made with ceramicist Cosmas Ndlovu using clay dug from the riverbank in Soweto, derived their form not only from aesthetic factors, but from the materials used to make them and the needs of the bees who would inhabit them. At once works of art and objects of use, the multilayered sculptures foreground our interdependent relationship with nature.
The soundtrack likewise referenced circular ecologies, with the instruments having first been modelled in beeswax and then cast in brass salvaged from electric waste in Nigeria. Dunja teamed up with percussionists to record the sounds made by her instruments, which became the sound bank from which music was composed by Adey Omotade, Damola Owolade, Dion Monti, Gugulethu ‘Dumama’ Duma, Elsa M’ba- la, Grace Kalima N. / Aliby Mwehu, Jill Richard, Rikki Ililonga. Following the presentation of ‘HUM’ at Victoria Yards in Johannesburg in 2022, the clay hives were relocated outdoors to become homes for bees.
A larger swarm of collaborators
‘Hiving and HUMing’ was conceived as the next chapter of the collaboration, continuing their multidisciplinary and multisensory exploration of apiculture and ethnomusicology with a larger swarm of collaborators.
Together with curator Amy Watson, POOL in Cape Town become a hive for the first public moment of the project in March 2024 with a programme of workshops, events and gatherings. This included a beehive making workshop led by Klaas Vlegter and hosted at the Ikhaya Kulture Garden in Khayelitsha instructing participants on how to fabricate low-cost beehives using reclaimed and sustainable materials to support bees. On day two, Dunja and Thembalezwe hosted a talks programme titled ‘The Art of Bees and Gardens’ at Field Station in Green Point with social engineer Xolisa Bangani, indigenous plant specialist Simangaliso Ngalwana, artist and farmer Vuyo Myoli, beehive maker and beekeeper Klaas Vlegter, earth artist Izabeau Pretorius, beekeeper and researcher Neil Rusch, visual anthropologist Aladin Borioli, and artist Simnikiwe Buhlungu.
Diving deeper
Following this, Dunja and Thembalezwe continued to deepen their understanding of grass as an age-old material for make beehives by travelled to Hlabisa in Northern Kwa-Zulu Natal to meet two renowned master basket weavers, Beauty Ngxongo and Angeline Masuku. The Zulu basket weaving process involves the use of ilala palm tree leaves, which are dried and dyed through multiple open-fire boiling processes using organic and repurposed mediums such as berries, roots, bark and rusted tin cans to create a kaleidoscope of rich colours. Dunja and Thembalezwe commissioned the weavers to create interpretations of beehives for the Hiving and HUMing exhibition in the next phase of the project.
Hiving and HUMing’s process-led exploration into ethnomusicology delved into the impact of bees in the creation of instruments and the effect of their vibrations. Neil Rusch introduced Dunja and Thembalezwe to the bull-roarer or !goin !goin of the IXam-speaking San people, an aerophone instrument made from a blade of wood or bone attached to a string. In the Kirby Collection archive located at the South African College of Music of University of Cape Town (UCT), the !goin !goin is described as an instrument sounded to ‘attract bees’. Within their glass cases inside the archive, these instruments are inert. In response to these silences and prevailing questions around archiving, musicians and makers Farai Machingambi and Ntomb’Yelanga were invited to created new instruments to push the boundaries of traditional instruments and imagine alternative histories and future sonics.
Material realms and sonic immersions
The project culminated in March 2025 with a multidisciplinary exhibition at Philippi Village and an intimate sonic programme inside the Kirby Collection archive room at the South African College of Music, UCT.
Across these two intersecting strands, ‘Hiving and HUMing’ brought together a swarm of collaborators who each offered interesting perspectives on alternative hive modalities and sonic vibrations. Dunja and Thembalezwe explain that the project ‘invites us to strengthen our kinship and renew sensitivities to the natural world through listening, observing, feeling and through acts of solidarity, in doing so we aim to demonstrate our interconnectedness and catalyse a continuum of eco-systemic symbiosis.’
The site for the multisensory exhibition – a twelve-meter-long shipping container situated within an indigenous horticultural garden at Philippi Village – was intentionally chosen to mirror the temporality and fluidity of bees’ attachment to spaces of occupation. This transitory logic was extended by the exhibition works moving inside and outside the container.
The exhibition included sculptural grass and clay beehives created by Dunja and Thembalezwe together with commissioned forms by the Hlabisa-based master weavers, an agave log hive by Neil Rusch and a collection of bronze and brass ‘listening’ devices by Dunja, sculpted in beeswax and cast in the ancient lost-wax casting tradition.
Outside the container, dance students from UCT’s Centre for Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies performed ‘Embodied Reciprocity’ in response to artist Simnikiwe Buhlungu’s sonic work ‘flight (tswee). dance (tswee)’ — a theremin recording capturing the transitional and transactional moments of honeybee life: flight, work, learning, searching, and perhaps, play. These recordings became a score, later translated into an orchestral soundscape that makes bee communication audible.
Bee vibrations connected the two public programmes. The ethnomusicology event inside the Kirby Collection archive included a reading by PHD student Brandon H Andrew of his paper ‘Re-imagining a sonic landscape through the Kirby Collection’, which reflected that ‘the instruments, such as the !goin!goin, require us to listen and engage with resonances that draw our hearing to notions of time and place, as time in the context of the |xam is not linear’.
This was followed by ‘Humming Vibrations’, an interactive dialogue by Farai Matake and Ntomb’Yelanga on their instrument-making process and a performance accompanied by Stephen De Souza.
Biographies
Dunja Herzog creates installations in which a larger spectrum of stories in their complex interrelationships of matter, material and their transformation and relationship to people, is made tangible and enables new perspectives. Working with natural materials is integral to her practice. Having worked on the African continent for the last twenty years, Dunja’s practice is rooted in different forms of exchange and collaboration. Inherent in her projects is an awareness of her own position and carefully addressing the complexities of the deeply unequal post-colonial societies in which she works.
Thembalezwe Mntambo works in the fields of urban beekeeping, food and climate justice and landscaping. Over the past seven years, he has established and supported food resilience and sustainability programmes in Johannesburg’s inner city. He follows a multi-dimensional exploratory approach, considering history, mysticism, sonics, ritual and process as physical and metaphysical pathways to symbiotic coexistence.
Co-creation grants
This pilot measure was launched in 2023 to support collaborative projects by tandems of artists from Switzerland and the regions of the liaison offices. Applications can be submitted until 1 June 2024.
- Co-creation projects (for cultural practitioners from West, Central, East and Southern Africa)
- Co-creation projects (for cultural practitioners from Switzerland)