Adrien Missika designs a metabolist bee hotel

La Raia Foundation will host a site-specific installation by Parisian artist Adrien Missika combining art, architecture and landscape. The Palazzo delle Api (Bees’ Palazzo) was born from a research on bee hotels started a few years ago during a residence in Mexico. These are common structures used by gardeners and farmers, designed to accommodate different varieties of pollinating insects – including solitary bees, bumblebees and ladybugs – providing them with a nesting spot and a place for hibernation. Inspired by the Japanese metabolic architecture of the 1960s, Missika’s sculpture is a sort of upside-down Aztec pyramid, that hosts up to 2,300 holes of various diameters to accommodate insects.

The work is made of Luserna stone, a local lamellar metamorphic rock, very difficult to carve, used as a paving around royal palaces in Turin, Racconigi, Venaria Reale and, more recently, the Louvre of Abu Dhabi by Jean Nouvel. “Adrien Missika is an explorer of real and fantastic worlds, who synthetizes in his works, that are formally ‘functionalist’ but conceptually poetical, articulated processes that are linked to the transformations of the world surrounding us,” explains Ilaria Bonacossa, art director at Fondazione La Raia. Palazzo delle Api is the sixth site-specific work created for the Foundation and will be enhanced by the insects’ activity, as time goes by and seasons change.