Bumblebee Familiar

Water Walks: Tracking the Familiar 

Video and Sound Installation, 2026

Created during the Water Walks course at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, this project is an exploration of three distinct sites shaped by water: Marker Wadden (an artificial archipelago), the North Sea, and Waterloopbos (a former hydrological test site located on a reclaimed seabed).

Through gathered field recordings and visuals, the work is structured as a vertical journey across three layers of the world: above water (driven by the winds of Marker Wadden), at sea level (the North Sea), and below water (the "underworld" of Waterloopbos).

In the upper and lower levels, I encountered a bumblebee. Rather than treating her simply as a biological subject, I began to approach her as a "familiar" sort of a guiding presence leading me through these environments. This narrative was consciously constructed to reintroduce aspects of animism. Drawing gently from Amerindian perspectives, which view plants, animals, and elements not as mute objects, but as active subjects with their own culture, agency, and point of view I sought to relate to the bee as a presence capable of guiding me, even if her world remains fundamentally inaccessible to mine.

This inaccessibility is mirrored in the technical execution of the work. I used a tracking system in TouchDesigner to follow the bumblebee, but because she moves so erratically and blends into the landscape, the tracker constantly fails. I consciously chose to leave these fails uncorrected; the failing digital tracker becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of fully capturing or translating another being's consciousness (their Umwelt). Similarly, my attempts to write from her perspective dissolved into a rhythmic, sensory chant, a repetition of words like warmth and descent, rather than cohesive human sentences.

In the middle layer, at sea level, the bumblebee disappears. Here, the guide becomes the water itself. While trying to write from the bee's perspective, I serendipitously found an old, forgotten text in my notebook about "being water." Accompanied by fluid animations, this middle segment represents a shift from following a distinct non-human being to simply being present with the water as its own living body.

Field recordings, video recordings, tracking system, water animation with text. Software: After Effects, TouchDesigner, 2026.