With Honey in the Mouth - Con Miel en la Boca

I am drawn to the ways bees move—how their dances, their labor, and their systems of care form a language of collective survival. Honeybees are essential to sustaining our global ecosystem, yet today they are increasingly displaced through migratory pollination, transported across regions as climate change and pesticides diminish native populations. In this movement, I recognize a reflection of human migration: bodies in transit, labor extracted, survival negotiated across unfamiliar landscapes.
 

In both bees and migrant communities, I see a shared condition—one rooted in endurance, in the expansion of territory for survival, and in the responsibility of sustaining future generations. Their labor feeds systems far beyond themselves, often without recognition. Yet within that labor exists a profound form of knowledge: how to move together, how to care collectively, how to persist.
 

This work is grounded in my childhood in Colombia, where I first encountered bees in my elementary school. They became my earliest teachers—offering a model of service, purpose, and interconnectedness that continues to shape my practice. Through them, I began to understand life as something lived in relation to others, beyond the self.
 

Developed over a two-year residency at Grand Central Art Center, the project unfolds across sculpture, video, photography, and sound. I created beeswax forms in collaboration with eight active colonies in my Santa Ana backyard, allowing the bees to shape the material alongside me. The work extends into photographic and video pieces produced between Santa Ana and Colombia, and sculptural installations incorporating original hive boxes.
 

At its core is a sound work that layers recordings from within the hives with oral histories of women in my family, tracing their migration from Colombia to the United States. This piece was created in collaboration with my son, musician Gabriel Lopez Rojas, whose composition weaves these voices into a shared sonic landscape—one that holds memory, movement, and lineage.