Enrique Radigales
Bug
Solo exhibition
17.10.2024—19.01.2025
Fundación Díaz Caneja, C/ Lope de Vega, 2, 34001 Palencia.
Bug (Error)
2018-2022
Aluminum installation, glass, wood, beeswax, wax moth (Galleria mellonella) depositions.
Courtesy of the artist and “La naturaleza del paisaje
The Bug project began in the winter of 2018 with the first sketches of a bee hive. The hive was built the following year with glass and white aluminum, and housed its first community of bees in the spring of 2020. Installed in the Montes de Toledo, the hive appeared as a scenario of conflict where the very life of an entire biological community was forced and guarded, as well as a way to visualize the influence of human activity on our natural environment. During the following summer, this society, composed of more than 30,000 members with a collaborative consciousness and intelligence, operated as a single organism. However, in the late summer of 2022 a specimen of the wax moth (Galleria mellonella) managed to infiltrate the hive and spawn a brood of larvae, which would eventually devour the wax conglomerate and drive the bees out of the hive. A bug in computing is usually translated into English as “error” and refers to a malfunction in a program or operating system. The term was coined in 1947 when a one-centimeter moth entered a 23-ton computer, rendering it inoperative.