Beginner Hive Mind

Beginner Hive Mind,

2014 Digital Video 07:51 min

Filmed at the Pruitt Igoe Bee Sanctuary pilot site, the footage explores the hive as a superorganism and demonstrates the bees collective goal bringing in pollen. Beginner Hive Mind references the Zen Buddhist practice of learning as a beginner and keeping your mind empty of preconceived notions in order to be open to the many possibilities that may be. Chavez’s close observation of the bees allows him to reconnect to a deeper ecology to view nature, food and architecture as a whole, which provokes the question: Are we as a community able to learn from the bees and function as a superorganism?

The Pruitt-Igoe Bee Sanctuary is a proposal for the City of Saint Louis to transform the urban forest where the Pruitt-Igoe housing development once stood into a public space that preserves the remaining 33 acres of green space and cultivates community through beekeeping and urban agriculture.