Atrium Reginae

The installation represents a beehive operculum in which the queen bee is born.  This event marks the end and the beginning for the whole colony of bees, that could remain or swarm elsewhere.  
It has been made within the woods surrounding the Castle of Civitella d’Arna, a deserted Umbrian village. The plants environment sets its own pace; hollow and pollarded trees have been used as the smallest meaningful linguistic unit, then linked to the studies of Nobel prize winner K. Von Frisch about the bees language. Pure wax has been molded by bees and Galleria Mellonella larvae (a parasite that lives with bees). During the first phase of work bees engaged in an unexpected dance around the operculum and they continue to relate to the site.  Alongside the main body is a shadow built with wire mesh, like a molecular copy.  
The translation of “atrium” in French is “aitre”, phonetically it’s “être”: to be.  An atrium was originally an open space, a landscape, a churchyard. In modern architecture it is a standstill place between inside and outside. Thus, stainless steel as the masculine subject becomes the site of the atrium.  It reflects awareness and intimacy of the empty space in which a new collective consciousness can find nourishment in the journey between an inside and an outside.