Beatrice Marchi La Compagnia - To Be a B(ee), 2025

With La Compagnia - To Be a B(ee), Beatrice Marchi has constructed a fictional community through performance, live-action footage, and stop-motion animation. The single-channel video follows the story of a bee moving through the outskirts of Milan, where everyday social relations gradually take on a darker, more theatrical tone. Around this figure, a group forms through gestures of cooperation, rivalry, dependence, and play, while the narrative also evokes a mysterious community involved in ritual activity in the forest.

As in much of Marchi’s work, whose practice encompasses video and painting, identity appears as something performed in relation to others. Drawing on Jacques Lecoq’s (1921–1999) method of the clown, in which vulnerability becomes a way of connecting with an audience, the artist develops characters who are comic, fragile, and sometimes unstable. Here, humor and unease coexist: the bee becomes both a social creature and a figure of displacement, moving between belonging and exclusion.

The work also reflects Marchi’s interest in generational conflict and in stereotypes surrounding the countryside and the city. The outskirts of Milan become a space where these tensions are staged through fantasy and ritual. Combining irony and theatricality, La Compagnia – To Be a B(ee) examines how groups create roles, rules, and myths, and how individuals attempt to inhabit or escape them.