The Bees are on tour this Spring!

Warm greetings from the Beehive Collective

We hope this note finds you well and inspired for the New Year...

We Bees are currently plotting our 2009 tour schedule,and we’d LOVE to collaborate with you to organize a Beehive presentation in your area. Read on for more information, or jump to sections in this email using the links to the right.

In Search Of Worker Bees

This Spring, we are also seeking qualified, committed collaborators to join our organization and work with us on our Mesoamerica Resiste Graphics Campaign and Maine Outreach & Machias Valley Grange Hall Project.

Visit the “Wannabees” section of our website to learn more about these opportunities to join forces with the Hive!

Presentations and Workshops

On tour with giant, portable murals, the Bees use art as a tool for popular analysis, education and organizing. We offer a variety of high energy, interactive, graphic-based picture-lectures that speak to the overwhelming and complex picture of globalization, militarization, and resource extraction, as well as the small-scale changes and actions we can undertake to build another world.

The Beehive's innovative, arts-based education strategy can benefit your community, school, or organization by provoking discussion, raising hard questions, and offering a hopeful story in an era of too much bad news.

We can work with you to craft a Beehive presentation that meets your group's needs. Please see below for details about different options for booking the Bees, and know that we can be flexible and adapt to your venue! If you are interested in collaborating, or if you know someone else who might be, please read on and be in touch....

Please visit our tour SCHEDULE for current dates.

NOW BOOKING: SPRING TOUR 2009

Picture-lectures and workshops to be understood by anyone - not just the experts and political analysts! JOIN IN as we de-construct the complex and overwhelming issues that are shaping our world, using bio-regionally accurate depictions of animals and insects as metaphors to link cultural and ecological diversity.

MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL
the true cost of coal

Long exploited as a resourcce-extraction colony within the US, the Appalachian Mountains are home to a fight for survival whose outcome will determine in part the industrial power ofthis country. Without coal, there would be no 'cheap' electricity. Today’s energy corporations and government bodies are continuing to show the extent of their violence and greed as they push their extractive agendas in the “New Coal Rush.”

Our insatiable demand for cheap power has lead to the most extreme, devastating form of coal mining yet, Mountaintop Removal (MTR). The TRUE COST OF COAL graphic uses MTR in Appalachia as a lens through which to understand the historical and contemporary story of ENERGY, RESOURCE EXTRACTION and of AMERICAN EMPIRE accelerating throughout the world. We will expose the DECEPTIONS of CLEAN COAL technologies and bring to light the ensuing CLIMATE CHAOS facing the world today.

With a gigantic portable mural-in-process teeming with intricate images of plants and animals from the most bio-diverse temperate forest on the planet, the Bees will share (and seek) stories of how coal mining and Mountaintop Removal affect communities and ecosystems throughout Appalachia and beyond.

This graphic also looks to the future, raising questions about resistance, regeneration, and remediation while celebrating stories of struggle from mountain communities. The TRUE COST OF COAL will challenge all of us who casually flip on a light switch to examine our own connections to MTR- and to think about what we can do to stop it from within our own communities.

Learn more about this graphics campaign-in-process as it unfolds at: beehivecollective.blogspot.com

DISMANTLING MONOCULTURE
Tales of Ants & Economies in the Americas

(Esta presentación está disponible EN ESPAÑOL)

As a friend and supporter of the Beehive, you may be familiar with the first two works in our trilogy about globalization in the Americas, the FREE TRADE AREA OF THE AMERICAS and PLAN COLOMBIA campaigns. (not familiar? click a title to learn more)

This narrative weaves together images from the Beehive Collective's Graphic Trilogy focused on corporate globalization in the Americas. With giant portable murals the Bees take audiences on an interactive VISUAL tour of the connections between COLONIZATION, MILITARIZATION, and RESOURCE EXTRACTION disguised as “industrial development.”

For the past several years, Bees have been touring the Americas and Europe with these two graphics in tandem. With two giant illustrated portable murals, a six foot tall fabric storybook, and an engaging narrative, the Bees have awed and inspired audiences across the hemispheres.

The 2009 version will also include previews of scenes from MESOAMERICA RESISTE, the final epic chapter in the trilogy, our most ambitious and elaborate illustration to date...5 YEARS in the making and nearly hatched!

MESOAMERICA RESISTE

This graphic, currently under construction, is the third and final in the Beehive’s trilogy on globalization in the Americas. The intricate map of images is focused on Mexico and Central America as a means of telling a larger story about, COLONIZATION, GLOBAL ECONOMY and MEGA-INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT projects.

Like it’s global counterparts, Project Mesoamerica (formerly "Plan Puebla Panama") aims to colonize and transform the land from Mexico to Colombia in the interest of building infrastructure to facilitate resource extraction and "efficient" global trade routes…just as early European monarchies set out to do 500 years ago.

The title ‘Mesoamerica Resiste’ reflects our efforts to document, illustrate, and share stories of grassroots movements working to oppose top-down development through horizontal community based organizing, as well as to honor the incredible Mesoamerican biodiversity threatened by this plan.

Featuring over 300 distinct species of plants and animals, Mesoamerica Resiste! is by far and away our most ambitious and elaborate illustration to date.

With the final stages of inking and printing yet-to-be completed, the Mesoamerica Resiste! graphic is on the road as a ‘picture-lecture’ or ‘workshop’ using bite-size pieces of the immensely detailed graphic narrative in a slideshow format.

Polinations/Polinizaciones

(Esta presentación está disponible EN ESPAÑOL)

Polinizaciones is a grassroots collaboration between communities, pollinator bees, activists ants, and collectives in Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela.

Throughout Abya Yala (South America), Beehive graphics are being used by youth and community educators in Indigenous, Afro descendent, campesino, and urban poor communities as a medium for dialogue and raising consciousness around the current threats against these communities. The work of Polinizaciones creates another way to converse, as well as to build and understand our history in the context of globalization, Plan Colombia, Free Trade, IIRSA-Plan Puebla Panama and corporate colonization.

This spring, a recently-returned South American Bee is heading out on an Atlantic Coast Tour, sharing the work of Polinizaciones. The bilingual Reportback will highlight the Beehive's giant Plan Colombia banner, enriched with projected photographs, audio recordings of interviews and music, and personal experiences and stories about the communities in resistance we have been weaving relations of mutual aid with over the last two years.

Kicking off in late February 2009, the tour will cover the Atlantic Coast from Miami, FL to Machias, ME, making stops at community spaces, universities, high schools, cultural centers and other spaces interested in Polinizaciones.

The Polinizaciones Atlantic Coast tour is especially committed to sharing these Southern Winds of Resistance with immigrant and communities of color and is excited at the opportunity to be able to do presentations in Español.

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POLINIZACIONES NORTEAMERICA
GIRA POR LA COSTA ATLANTICA / NUEVA YORK / ONTARIO / QUEBEC

En vuelo, acompañadas por los telones gigantes, las Abejas buscan ilustrar las conexiones entre la historia colonial y las realidades actuales de las luchas contra la globalización transnacional, la violencia y el racismo. La Colmena, que está integrada por abejas voluntarias, hace obras gráficas sin derechos de autor que se usan como herramientas para promover el análisis, la educación y la organización popular. Nuestras presentaciones y talleres están hechos en un formato accesible y tratan sobre cómo desarmar y mejor entender la extracción de los recursos naturales, la militarización y el desarrollo industrial en las Américas, sus interconexiones y su vínculo con procesos mucho más grandes.

Polinizaciones se basa en el trabajo colaborativo entre abejas polinizadoras, hormigas activistas y colectivos en Colombia, Ecuador y Venezuela.

En distintas regiones de Abya Yala (Suramérica), las obras gráficas de la Colmena están siendo utilizadas por jóvenes y docentes de comunidades Indígenas, Afrodescendientes, Campesinos y Urbanos Populares como un medio para crear dialogo y concientización alrededor de las amenazas que rodean a estas comunidades. Usando las obras de la Colmena además de otros medios comunicativos, el trabajo de Polinizaciones busca crear espacios en donde se puede conversar, construir y entender mejor nuestras historias en el contexto de la globalización, del Plan Colombia, de los Tratados de Libre Comercio, del IIRSA-Plan Puebla Panamá y de la transnacionalización.

Esta gira trae a una Abeja Suramericana recién llegada a Norteamérica estará compartiendo el trabajo de Polinizaciones. El informe bilingüe presentará el telón de Plan Colombia y enriquecido con la proyección de fotografías, grabaciones de audio de entrevistas y música, y las experiencias personales y las historias de las diferentes comunidades en resistencia con quien hemos tejido relaciones de apoyo mutuo en estos últimos dos años.

Tomando vuelo a finales de Febrero 2009, esta abeja migrará por la costa Atlántica de Miami, Florida, hasta Machias, Maine, aterrizando en espacios comunitarios, universidades, colegios, centros culturales y otros sitios interesados en el trabajo de Polinizaciones.

Esta gira de Polinizaciones por la Costa Atlántica Norteamericana está particularmente interesada en compartir con comunidades Afrodescendientes, Indígenas e Inmigrantes y nos encantaría la oportunidad de realizar presentaciones en Español.

¡INVITA A LAS ABEJAS!