Aladin Borioli

Aladin Borioli’s interest in beehives was passed down to him by his grandfather, a beekeeper. After training in visual arts at ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art in Lausanne, and in anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin, since 2014 Aladin Borioli has been building up a vast corpus of photographs, videos, sounds and ethnographic material. His long-term project subtly blends artistic and scientific approaches, such as photography, architecture, anthropology, and ethology. He is publishing a book to coincide with Festival Images Vevey, compiling hundreds of archives to present a new history of beehives. This fascinating visual glossary traces the diverse contraptions humans invented for bees between 2400 BCE and 1852, the date when the “modern” beehive was patented. The artist chose this symbolic period to portray the creativity beehives incited before entering a more dormant state.