The Chaff More Precious than the Wheat

By domesticating different plants and animals, humans have also discovered insects, which accumulate a wide range of valuable materials and ensure the cyclical nature of the ecosystem. Bees and beekeeping have long been of great economic and cultural importance. As societal patterns have changed, the relationship with nature and the motives for shaping it have inevitably evolved as well. The Anthropocene, which marks the beginning of human influence on geological processes, is also the beginning of irreversible global climate change, posing a serious challenge to the survival of most life forms, including bees. “Mice are more precious than grain” is a project that reflects on the evolution of the relationship between bees and humans, and the spatial, social and cultural phenomena that emerge from it. Through the case of bee-human symbiosis, the project attempts to grasp broader ecological issues related to interspecies action, resource extraction, bioethics and the significance of the collective imagination in shaping our environment.

During the summer of 2024, in a creative laboratory initiated by Akee, the Hungarian company Architecture Uncomfortable Workshop, together with architecture students Marta Dorothea Lekavičiūtė and Ieva Bagdonaitė, used strategies and methods of speculative architecture, spatial experiments and material design to explore the local context, and to create a spatial installation, after having clarified the team’s individual and collective approaches.

As part of the project ‘The Chaff More Precious than the Wheat’, the spatial installation created by AUW in collaboration with architecture students reevaluates relationships between humans, bees and the environment we share. The installation consists of two elements embodying the duality between foraging and domestication habits as well as the tools that come within them.

Photos by Architecture Uncomfortable Workshop and Monika Jagusinskytė

Curated by Martynas Germanavičius and Vilius Vaitiekūnas
Communication: Aistė Marija Stankevičiūtė
Assistants: Ieva Bagdonaitė and Marta Dorotėja Lekavičiūtė
Finance: Dovilė Lapinkskaitė

The project is funded by:

Project partners:
Culture Complex SODAS 2123, artnews.lt, Architektūros fondas, Pakruojis “Atžalyno” gymnasium, Radio Vilnius

This project is part of the Circular Design Alliance co-funded by the European Union.