DIAMBE DA SILVA

The exhibition, unfolding through sculpture, painting, and film, develops from early encounters with bees in Diambe’s São Paulo studio; what began as observation gave way to entanglement. Bees entered the space uninvited and stayed. Their presence introduced new rhythms of awareness and new questions: about the porousness between living systems and built environ- ments and about how bodies gather, adapt, or refuse containment.

The exhibition’s architecture follows the logic of a beehive. Sculptures rest on modular, honeycomb-like platforms. Visitors move among them, pause, and regroup, like a swarm responding to signals it doesn’t fully understand. In a central video, two beeswax sculptures are coated in sugar syrup and left in a field.

A swarm arrives. Slowly, over time, the figures are hollowed out and collapse. What appears to be a ruin is simultaneously a testament to the emergence of something new.

Surrounding these sculptural moments are paintings that fold in sacred landscape traditions. Seeds, market scraps, and traces of trade circulate across them, pointing to longer histories of movement, extraction, and survival. Bees beings beans does not attempt to explain these systems. The exhibition dwells in them, holding together matter and memory, climate and city, bodies, and the forces that shape them.