Technologies have an ancestry too. Every new piece of techno-wizadry contains the ghost of its past. The modern beehive — a standardized white box — was patented in 1852. But what we gained in intellectual property and liberal progress, we lost in indigenous wisdom and creativity. Hives, 2400 BC - 1852 CE grants us the pleasure of sifting through an archive of forgotten possibilities. What emerges is an account of what was, what could have been and what beekeeping could someday still become — so long as we stop bending the arc of history towards what’s expedient and profitable rather than what’s beautiful and truthful. Catalogued with minimal intervention, the photographs of Hives have been cut and pasted from various history books, encyclopaedias or newspaper articles, creating a meta-archive — or an archive of the ways in which we archive our archives.

Published by: RVB Books (Paris)
Pages: 424
Size: 11 x 15 cm,
Cover: softcover