Lecture Room 105
This talk is a conversation between alfonso borragán and Holly Birtles about the book marentus, a project driven by an optical beehive inhabited by a colony of honeybees.
Holly Birtles and alfonso borragán will discuss Borragan’s publication associated with the project Marentus, uncovering the processes of documentation, production, and collaboration. The talk explores photographic ingestion through interdisciplinary and collective practices, highlighting how diverse perspectives from a wide range of specialists and local communities inform and shape the project. marentus (honeycomb in Latin) is a project series driven by an optical beehive inhabited by a colony of honeybees. Inside this artefact, two parallel physical-chemical laboratories were habilitated, both subjected to the same environmental conditions. This allowed for the transformation of the flower nectar into honey, and the silver bromide into an analogical image. The image that laid behind could only be extracted by consuming the honey and wax from the hive, and was unleashed and revealed through collectiveingestions of the beehive. These actions have taken place in Santander (marentus’) and Barcelona (marentus’’).
Alfonso Borragán is an interdisciplinary artist. His practice is articulated between research, teaching, collective processes and performative action. He explores and activates relational processes, physical and metaphysical, with the earth, usually though collective processes and collective actions. His practice is manifested inside the fragility of collective processes and the ephemerality of action, like a latent image in constant change.
Holly Birtles is a photographic artist whose practice combines performance, prop-making, and analogue/digital techniques. Working collaboratively with artists, writers, and musicians, she explores ecology, place, and myth through performance and documentation. Her work investigates ecological loss, slow violence, and sentimentality, often connecting rivers and volcanic landscapes through interdisciplinary practice. She is the course leader of BA (Hons) Photography at Brighton University.
