A Honeycomb Conjecture: Hexagonal Imaginaries and Interspecies Storytelling for Le Grand Paris

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.

— Donna Haraway¹

Defined variously as ‘the Great Derangement’, ‘the New Climatic Regime’, and by geologists as ‘the Anthropocene’, our era has seen scientists, philosophers, and scholars from across the arts and humanities call out for new ways to tell stories about our relationship to the planet.² Within new materialist and ecological feminist philosophies, the attention paid to storying has brought to light the mechanisms through which particular structures of knowledge have separated human histories and histories of the natural world, ordering understandings of reality through binary severances such as nature/culture, human/animal.³ This nonhuman turn has spotlighted the power geometries at work in such dichotomies, and its proponents see one of the major challenges of the Anthropocene to lie in finding ways to bring together these separated modes of storying the ‘human’ and the ‘natural’.⁴ As Jane Bennett expresses it, ‘Perhaps the big project of the nonhuman turn is to find new techniques, in speech and art and mood, to disclose the participation of nonhumans in “our” world’.⁵ In the theoretical literature, such techniques have included valuable concepts such as Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s ‘assemblage’; Bruno Latour’s ‘actants’; Donna Haraway’s ‘situated histories’, ‘sympoiesis’, ‘thinking-with’ and ‘material semiotics’; Anna L. Tsing’s ‘feral effects’; Karen Barad’s ‘intra-action’; and Bennett’s ‘vital matter’, amongst many others.⁶ In these debates, one of the strategic sites for investigation has been the city. While the UN Habitat III conference identified urbanization as a major cause of climate change, delegates also put forth the possibility that we look to the city to find responses.⁷ Emergent subfields, notably urban political ecologies, have understood the city as a metabolic process and framed politics in terms of a ‘socio-ecological’ order, thinking about how social justice frameworks, which have informed critical urbanism since its inception, might intersect with issues of environmental justice to create new forms of emancipatory political action.⁸ Likewise, urban planning scholars have begun to pay critical attention to how infrastructures and materials are ideologically loaded in determining which bodies (human and animal) and things (natural and cultural) matter in, of, and for cities.⁹ Briefly, ecology in the city is concerned with the effect of the urban matrix on focal patches within the urban environment; ecology of the city recognizes the city as a coupled human–natural system with complex feedback loops; ecology for the city extends this relational understanding to take on transdisciplinary approaches and deploy ecological knowledge for civic ends. Thus, we see developing scholarship around ‘material imaginaries’, which takes seriously the co-constructive role of mediums (technological, material, corporeal, artistic, poetic) and the positionality of perspectives in multi-scalar processes and relationships of power that shape urban environments.¹⁰

Contributing to the growing field of urban ecocriticism, this article draws on such new materialist methodologies to investigate artistic modes of storying the city and its human–animal interrelations — a practice we will describe as ‘honeycombing’ — which are taking place on an urban farm on the outskirts of Paris. Located in the 93rd department of France, situated 500 metres from the Métro station off the Avenue de Stalingrad in Saint-Denis, ‘Zone sensible — la ferme urbaine de Saint-Denis’ is a vestige of the Plaine des Vertus, once the largest landholding in France and known as the Grenier de Paris due to its role in feeding the population living within the city limits (see Figure 1). Since 2016, following a call from the municipality to create an urban farm for the town, the four-hectare smallholding has been managed jointly by Les Fermes de Gally (an educational and commercial agricultural organization) and by the Parti poétique (a transdisciplinary collective founded by the artist and beekeeper Olivier Darné). The collective is responsible for cultivating one hectare of the plot which they call ‘Zone sensible’, in an appropriation of the Plan local d’urbanisme’s designation for disadvantaged — and by implication ‘dangerous’ — banlieues. Sensitive to the intersections of the social and ecological, over the years the collective has experimented with the meaning of the ‘culture’ in ‘agriculture’, offering multidisciplinary events (exhibitions, concerts, debates, open-air cinema, and theatre), residencies for chefs, artists, and researchers, as well as guided tours and practical educational workshops. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the Zone sensible has also developed practices of solidarity, supporting residents living in precarity with food packages and free workshops, as well as providing training for refugees and people seeking asylum and offering sustained engagement with the community through its ‘Farm Club’, where participants learn horticulture and grow vegetables on the site.¹¹

Figure 1

 Aerial view of Zone sensible. Photograph by Olivier Darné. Saint-Denis, 2023. © Olivier Darné.

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Situating Darné’s initiative within the context of the Grand Paris project, in a first movement this article explores government discourses around urban sustainability before moving on to examine the agripoetical project led by the Parti poétique, ‘Pollinisation de la Ville’ (2003– ).¹² If spatial imaginaries of national coherence and global influence have in France been storied through the geometrical figure of the hexagon, the question concerning us here is whether thinking with another hexagonal structure — honeycomb — might disturb such imaginaries and tell other stories? How might thinking with honeycomb help us reflect critically on the Hexagon?

Working with the possibilities for enquiry paved by Latour’s distinction between modern human-centric imaginaries of ‘le Globe’ and the living bio-geosphere that is ‘la Terre’, our discussion scales the modalities of Latour’s topological imaginaries to the city.¹³ The first, human-centric, imaginary maps the city politically, economically, and administratively. Rather than ‘Globe’, we configure this imaginary for the French context in terms of ‘hexagonality’. In geometry, the hexagon consists of a series of fixed points on a Euclidean plane, with the lines joining these points determining finite boundaries so that, within these parameters, the single hexagon is non-relational. Resonant with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s notion of ‘arborescence’, in our more symbolically ‘French’ version of this theoretical matrix, the hexagon’s geometry is representative of a territorialization; an impermeability working to ensure identification and coherence.¹⁴ By extension, ‘hexagonality’ can be thought of as a major axiomatic mode, which is to say that, in hexagonal ways of imagining the city, coding parameters are high — boundaries and edges patrolled, value placed on unity, homogeneity, and conformity. Historically speaking, hexagonal mechanisms are evident in times of threat or conflict.¹⁵ Indeed, France’s nomination as L’Hexagone adheres to values of strength, unity, and the sense of ‘always having been thus’. As Nathaniel B. Smith emphasizes, the hexagon’s geometric coherence operated throughout its history as a tool for the co-option of national frontiers and a ‘rational’ justification for the geopolitical borders of France.¹⁶

Latour’s second modality, the bio-geospheric imaginary, comprehends the city as an assemblage emergent from the land that is lived on and from.¹⁷ We configure this imaginary’s elaborate interdependencies in terms of ‘honeycombing’. Geometrically, honeycombing engages the hexagon in multiplication, tessellations which, by proliferating the figure, extend it through variations that are responsive to material contingencies in the living world.¹⁸ In ‘honeycombing’ coding parameters are looser and, spatially, akin to borderlands, crossings, sites of reciprocal interaction and interrelation. As we shall see in our analysis of Miel béton (the honey produced by the Parti poétique), honeycombing is a productive theoretical tool which refers to material-discursive operations — in this case, the molecular interactions contributing to the creation of, and circulation of meanings in, a jar of honey. The question guiding this discussion is how participatory art practices such as those of the Parti poétique counteract the hexagonal logics of top-down planning and speculation through the (figurative and literal) honeycomb of beekeeping, farming, and pollination. Taking up Haraway’s invitation to ‘make space for unexpected companions’, I analyse Miel béton as an example of a ‘sympoietic’ gesture, which is to say a ‘making-with’ and a ‘thinking-with’ bees that catalyses reflection on the inadequacies of anthropocentric urbanism in the twenty-first century.¹⁹

The hexagonalities of Grand Paris: sustainability on the surface

The racism and neocolonialism underpinning Republican socio-spatial planning in the Paris banlieues have been well documented, with research justifiably framed through the lens of social justice and identity politics.²⁰ Less discussed, however, are how these power geometries play out, at human and more-than-human scales, in ecological imaginaries of the city. By ‘imaginaries’ here, we refer to ‘assemblages of stories, images, memories or experiences of places’, which require mediums or materials through which such assemblages are co-constituted.²¹ Departing from mental mapping traditions, such an understanding gives weight to the materiality of imaginaries in the production of ‘profoundly ideological landscapes whose representations of space are entangled with relations of power’.²² Urban ecological imaginaries, by extension, refer to ‘symbolic, cognitive, and discursive’ articulations of nature and ecology in urban contexts,²³ how these are made visible or invisible, and to the epistemologies underpinning the practices, policies, and institutions that co-constitute such imaginaries. In the following section, we look first at how ecology appears wrapped in the guise of ‘sustainability’ in Grand Paris, before moving to examine the underlying spatial imaginaries driving the Grand Paris sustainability model.

From its earliest phases, ‘nature’ featured as a core problematic for urban redevelopment in the Île-de-France, with Sarkozy framing the pari of ‘Grand Paris’ as an environmental one: ‘Comment inventer la ville durable, la ville de l’après Kyoto, la ville écologique, la ville qui s’allie avec la nature au lieu de la combattre? Voilà le plus grand défi peut-être de la politique du xxi^e siècle.’²⁴ Integrating nature into the fabric of the city has formed part of Parisian planning imaginaries since Haussmann, under whose governance ‘nature’ was imagined and constructed to conform with green space policies aimed at improving urban hygiene as well as social order.²⁵ Contemporary planning discourses fold nature into frameworks of ‘sustainability’ (durabilité) that, in the Grand Paris programme, adhere closely to the World Bank’s 2014 strategy which is based on the three pillars of social inclusion, environmental stewardship, and economic growth.²⁶ Under such economic growth models, sustainability translates in practice to policies of urban densification, mobility, and connectivity. The discourse is evident in Sarkozy’s assertion, for example, that, ‘Le développement durable […] c’est un terme qui s’inscrit dans le progrès, pas dans la régression. Son ambition, c’est la croissance, c’est le confort, c’est la mobilité, c’est le pouvoir d’achat’.²⁷ In Grand Paris, sustainability has largely materialized in architectural and infrastructural models designed to tunnel beneath and build over urban ground. When complete, plans for the Grand Paris Express rail network will extend the metropolitan railway by 200 km, bore 160 km of underground tunnel, and build sixty-eight new railway stations. Meanwhile public–private partnerships aim to erect over 80,000 housing units a year. In these models, modern narratives of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ are transfigured to lexicons of ‘green’ job creation, but they culminate in similar infrastructural undertakings to industrialism such as densification and underground urbanization.²⁸ These initiatives are further accompanied by co-ordinated public–private innovation in environmental technologies, with nuclear energy increasingly normalized in presidential discourse as a ‘green’ substitute for non-renewable sources.²⁹ In the end, these models reveal the speculative character of the Grand Paris Project’s reconstruction of the Île-de-France and its aim of magnifying and magnetizing the region on a global scale.³⁰

While the expense and disturbance ensuant on the Grand Paris Express and neighbourhood redevelopment are rationalized by the government in the language of social justice — more connections to the urban core mean more opportunities — urbanists have demonstrated the social asymmetries of access to the real estate and new mobilities which drive the project.³¹ Other critics have questioned the sustainability logic of the infrastructures themselves, with Pierre Merlin specifying that, rather than furthering density in already urbanized areas, the ring rail system is disposed to stimulate further urban sprawl in the grande couronne.³² Reviewing the initial outlines of the Grand Paris Express in 2010, the Autorité environnementale (AE) warned of increased flood risk, waste management problems, excessive vibrations of vulnerable soils, forest encroachment, and the destruction of vital agricultural land.³³ Furthermore, in cases where public consultations and debates have been organized around ecological themes, experts reported feeling relegated within these fora, particularly in relation to their concerns about biodiversity and nonhuman life.³⁴ This is hardly surprising given the human-centric tenor of Sarkozy’s landmark speech at the Palais de Chaillot on 29 April 2009, which situated the urban natural environment as a wholly human imperative, and the welfare of its biosphere solely in terms of future human benefit. While insisting that Grand Paris would ‘rompre avec un rationalisme si excessif et si glaçant qu’il finit par être à l’opposé même de la vie’, the president’s vision remained fixed in rationalist anthropocentrism, as he proclaimed that ‘Le point de vue de l’Homme est le seul point de vue qui vaille pour penser la ville’.³⁵ Additionally, the distribution of environmental debates mirrors socio-spatial inequalities across the region, with very few happening in the already densely urbanized spaces of Seine-Saint-Denis, and most fora occurring in areas long coveted for urbanization, such as the Plateau de Saclay and the Triangle de Gonesse. As Fabre, Prévot, and Semal attest, ‘Grand Paris [met] en lumière un processus de relégation des questions de biodiversité et de nature en ville, selon un scénario que l’on pourrait qualifier de “business as usual”’.³⁶ This sentiment is echoed by Louis Bouret in his response to the AE’s report, when he states that, ‘en dépit de ses prétentions visionnaires, le Grand Paris rêvé par Christian Blanc reste un projet du xx^e siècle, une époque où l’on aménageait l’espace de manière volontariste sans trop se soucier des équilibres naturels’.³⁷

One of the functions of dominant imaginaries is to make visible certain ways of seeing while rendering others invisible, configuring select bodies and spaces while disfiguring others.³⁸ As Latour has argued, ‘business as usual’ pertains to imaginaries of the land constructed in tandem with the material discourses of globalization, neoliberalism, and advanced capital.³⁹ Latour identifies these imaginaries with the flattened, inanimate cartographies of the Earth that emerge in base mapping systems, wherein Cartesian co-ordinates become the ideal way to register data sets and demonstrate relative distance between fixed data points. Such cartographic imaginaries of a totalized system are identifiable in the ‘Grand Paris rêvé par Christian Blanc’. In his book Le Grand Paris duxxi^esiècle, Blanc, the foremost political architect of the project in its foundational phases, storied an urgent need to render Paris a ‘ville-monde’ fit to restore the Hexagon’s supremacy on the world stage.⁴⁰ According to Blanc, the survival of Paris, and by extension France, in an economic and political context defined by rankings on the Global Cities Index, necessitates a ‘remise en question permanente de [son] modèle par rapport à [son] environnement’.⁴¹ Locating what Blanc means here by ‘environnement’ is important, for it reveals the conceptual ground upon which Grand Paris’s initial imaginaries were constructed. Blanc continues:

Aujourd’hui nous vivons dans un monde qui a réalisé son unité géographique. Il n’y a plus de terres inconnues et, sous pressions et les progrès de la technique, c’est à peine s’il reste des terres inaccessibles. Maintenant ‘le monde est monde’, les flux d’échanges se sont étirés jusqu’à prendre les dimensions de la planète. Dans cet espace conquis, les grandes métropoles autour desquelles se structurent ces échanges atteignent une intensité inédite. Ce qui nous conduit à repenser les mécaniques selon lesquelles nous avons raisonné sur les villes jusqu’à présent.⁴²

Blanc’s statement is issued from an Archimedean position: conquered first by cartography and more recently by communication technologies, the Earth appears flatly transparent. In this imaginary, Paris sits atop a homogeneous surface; a Euclidean plane where the survival of the Hexagon depends on its ability to harness, via a pervasive range of computational and visual technologies, the intersecting data flows and financial intensities of the global city. In keeping with the neoliberal ethos of competition and growth, exchange becomes the raison d’être of the city, which is imagined as a magnetic node on an accelerated planet mapped for all time: ‘le monde est monde’. Notably, Blanc’s imaginary organizes the world in ways reminiscent of Haraway’s ‘god trick’, an ‘objective’ all-seeing eye that enacts ‘a conquering gaze from nowhere’, embraces everything, and thus claims itself as neutral.⁴³ This is an immaterial gaze that paradoxically materializes everything it embraces in a specific way, arranging ground now as real estate, now as an Olympic swimming pool, now as a cluster of expertise. We term this imaginary ‘hexagonal’ for how it plots bodies and matter according to strategic points on to a flat plane. Charted with the networked flows of financial and technoscientific exchange, the environmental realities of urban ground figure little in hexagonal imaginaries of the global city. As Sarkozy frames it,

Le Grand Paris, ce n’est pas seulement l’élargissement des frontières de Paris.

Le Grand Paris, c’est Paris qui veut jouer un rôle dans l’économie européenne et dans l’économie mondiale. Le Grand Paris, c’est Paris qui veut être la carte maîtresse de la France en Europe et dans le monde.⁴⁴

In this cartographic imaginary, then, the speculative geometries of Grand Paris overlay the Hexagon so that, for France’s geo-economic future, le grand pari becomes the city itself; the ground is disembodied so as to maximize potential fiscal return and hovers in the projected yield of the next investment opportunity.⁴⁵ To summarize, hexagonal imaginaries persist in the fiction of the city as surface, a space without volume, onto which co-ordinates may be predictably plotted. To persist in modernist-humanist thought structures wherein the world is fully known and knowable and ‘l’Homme’ the only creaturely template through which to think the city is, eventually, to de-animate the ground. Nevertheless, ‘the city, too, is a form of nature’, and it is to the Parti poétique’s storying of this inexorable fact that we now turn.⁴⁶

Honeycombing the city: beneath the paving stones... the soil

Where hexagonalities flatten, ‘honeycombing’ is the figure-ground we use to name an alternative, affective composition-in-motion that situates thought and matter as emergent with the world. The potential of this figure-ground is disclosed through the work taking place at the urban farm, Zone sensible. Moreover, if honeycombing involves situating thought and matter in specific geographical situations, it also implies acknowledgement of the subjectivities doing this work, including those of the academic writer. Honeycombing as a method seeks to story the city in a way that is open to the affective possibilities and limitations of the researcher in situ, to think with the material while recognizing its opacity. It is necessary, therefore, to note that the questions directing this article did not emerge in a library, but rather as inklings during a conversation with a gardener in Saint-Denis, the notes from which I recount in what follows.

Situated by Google Maps at the nexus of the municipalities of Stains, Saint-Denis, and Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, the one-hectare holding of Zone sensible is more easily located for the walker by the landmarks of Université Paris 8 and the Grand Mosquée de Saint-Denis.⁴⁷ It is February 2019. Across the open field, the noise of traffic and voices of schoolchildren blend with the chatter of starlings and grass rustling in the breeze. I meet with Franck Ponthier, the farm’s chief horticulturist. Formerly a commercial executive specializing in urban green space, following years of retraining and joining the Parti poétique, Ponthier now plans crop cultivation and teaches permaculture at Zone sensible. Escorted by the farm’s resident dog, we walk together while Ponthier recounts the history of the smallholding. His story is a story of soil. Since 1920, the four hectares of what is now ‘la ferme urbaine de Saint-Denis’ had been cultivated by the Kersanté family before being repurchased by the communist municipal authorities in 1983. The Kersantés had grown mainly lettuce, a monocultural cropping system which meant that when the Parti poétique carried out their ecological survey in 2017 they found just three resident earthworms. Years of monocultural farming, pesticide use, and chemical fertilizers had deprived the soil of nitrogen, phosphorous, and calcium, meaning it had become compacted, poisonous, and all but uninhabitable to life; a typical, if small, plot of industrial farmland. Typical because this family’s relationship to the earth had been (de-)evolved through market competition and mediated through modern technology and science. To emphasize the difference between permacultural and industrial farming imaginaries of land, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider the significance of farm machines and monoculture here. As Kevin Michael Deluca argues in his discussion of Martin Heidegger’s environmental philosophy, this kind of ‘machination is about a logic, not a particular machine […] wherein animals, plants and the earth become objects, mere resources [and] are reduced to various forms of use values’.⁴⁸ In resonant ways, Heidegger had noted the extractivist sensibility of technoscience, which presents ‘the wood [as] a forest of timber, the mountain [as] a quarry of rock, the river [as] water-power, and the wind [as] wind “in the sails”’.⁴⁹ This instrumentalization of the earth — evident in the Kersantés’ agricultural exploitation — is based on an economic imaginary of the land, and chimes with the hexagonalities of abstraction already outlined.

By contrast, Ponthier’s storying of the soil attests to what Haraway has called a ‘sympoiesis’, or ‘making-with’, which she defines in the following way:

Sym-poiesis is a simple word; it means ‘making-with’. Nothing makes itself; nothing is really auto-poietic or self-organizing. In the words of the Iñupiat computer ‘world game’, earthlings are Never Alone. That is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding.⁵⁰

Similarly, in Ponthier’s ‘worlding’, worms are companions; master borers tunnelling air into earth and enabling the conditions through which countless other, human and nonhuman life forms might exist. A field with only three earthworms is a dead field, and, in response to Ponthier’s telling, this researcher finds her eyes sifting the soil, seeking out Charles Darwin’s ‘lowly organized creatures’ and wondering about the immense geological power of the worm burrows tunnelled beneath the flat cartographies of Google’s map.⁵¹ Ponthier’s story constitutes a honeycombing, a mode of disclosing urban land which brings into awareness its soil as assemblage. A co-functioning or ‘sympathy’,⁵² soil as assemblage is ‘an open-ended collective’, a grouping of living materials of all kinds, defined aptly by Bennett as ‘living, throbbing confederations that can function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within’.⁵³ In this way, Ponthier’s honeycombing transfigures urban space to retrieve an urban ground by revealing that ground’s mass of imbricated organisms,⁵⁴ intimately entangled with the socio-political human histories of this territory. In what follows, I trace the Parti poétique founder’s engagement with another critter — not the earthworm this time, but the honeybee, for it is through beekeeping that Olivier Darné developed his ecological understanding of and artistic engagement with the city. The analysis discusses the agencies and art involved in a jar of honey, which is at once honey and, in the telling, honeycombed. I conclude with a necessarily brief consideration of how the Europe-wide pollination project, Banque du miel, suggests a creatively resistive, or ‘agripoetical’, response to the anthropocentric imaginaries of hexagonal urbanism.⁵⁵

Miel béton: sympoietic capacities in a jar of honey

Olivier Darné grew up in the banlieue pavillonnaire of Saint-Denis. In interviews he recalls how this space, with its parcels of garden, planted balconies, and wasteland, cultivated a particular kind of ‘imaginaire’, marked equally by the temporalities of ‘l’ennui’ and the presence of ‘le vivant’.⁵⁶ Desiring to find ways to engage with this landscape, Darné recounts how he was first drawn to images in public spaces, understanding public space as an arena that changes and is changed by images. Progressively, however, the commercial saturation of urban visual space reframed his perception of images as monologic rather than dialogic tools, and he turned instead to texts to explore ways to create a means to correspond with the city. In 1993, he began reading apicultural volumes, recalling his fascination not with the craft per se, but rather with the social organization of the insect and the hive’s living resonance with human, specifically political, forms of co-operation. Social scientists have demonstrated the significance of urban beekeeping for bringing into view the entanglement of natural processes and the human intricacies of urbanism.⁵⁷ Realizing that if he wished to move beyond metaphorical tropes and ‘comprendre ce que c’est [que] cette complexité animale et sauvage’, he would have to ‘vivre avec les abeilles’,⁵⁸ in 1996 Darné placed his first hive, containing a brood of honeybees and a single queen, on the roof of his house in Saint-Denis. Over the course of one summer, the artist gleaned over 40 kg of honey. Darné describes the transformative effect this harvest had on his sense of self and his understanding of the city:

Avec une zone de butinage de trois kilomètres de rayon autour de la ruche, je cultivais grâce à ‘mes’ abeilles 3,000 hectares de ville sans être propriétaire de sol. Du gardien, je devenais ‘pirate’ et commençais à ‘comptabiliser’ l’invisible et l’inimaginable d’un trésor urbain.⁵⁹

Teasing out the strands of this bee–human relationship is where ‘honeycombing’ comes into play. Resting with Darné’s observation for a moment, we identify a shift in his sense of agency that emerges in thinking-with the capacities of the bee. The honeybees’ experience of the city is organized by other-than-human limitations as well as opportunities for action. Not directed by human boundaries or property rights, Darné is aware of how the worker bees navigate Saint-Denis according to their individual capacities, needs, and modes of social organization. In correspondence, the beekeeper-artist feels his agency extended to a range of motion beyond his human possibilities. These semi-wild creatures thus become companions in gleaning an urban territory which was previously either off limits, inconsequential, or invisible to the human animal. In sympoiesis, the honeybee’s capacities ‘f[ont] vaciller le moi’ and through re-cognition of the animal’s agency the artist’s self disseminates so that he finds his relationship to the environment enmeshed with the possibilities and capabilities of other creatures.⁶⁰ This conscious engagement of the artist with the insects’ abilities moves us beyond a straightforward honey harvest, so that when it comes to examining Miel béton, we question the nature of ‘artwork’ that we are talking about. What is, in fact, being produced here? What makes Darné ‘more’ than a beekeeper and how can we consider a jar of honey an artwork?

To explore these questions, we need to examine the ways we think about things — jars of honey, works of art — and interrogate the way these things, living and non-living, matter for our context and beyond. For instance, John Berger’s observations in ‘Why Look at Animals’, remind us of how modern knowledge structures have marginalized animal bodies, minds, and experiences through various forms of cultural appropriation. As Berger sees it,

The cultural marginalization of animals is of course a more complex process than their physical marginalization. The animals of the mind, instead of being dispersed, have been co-opted into other categories so that the category animal has lost its central importance. Mostly they have been co-opted into the family and into the spectacle.⁶¹

Such marginalization is at work in scientific entomological categorizations as well as in the representational strategies of cultural entomologies. These modes of storying either emphasize the insect’s otherness (as in scientific discourse) or collapse the bee into anthropocentric metaphor. Such is the case, for example, in Bernard Mandeville’s infamous The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits, which weaves an imaginary of human beings devoid of social virtue through the metaphor of the hive.⁶² Similarly, Napoleon Bonaparte’s imperial bee performs as symbol for the human values of hard work, efficiency, and social order.⁶³ As social insects, honeybees function within the discursive order of imperialism as models for unity, co-operation, and industriousness. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, ‘La société et l’État ont besoin de caractères animaux pour classer les hommes; l’histoire naturelle et la science ont besoin de caractères, pour classer les animaux eux-mêmes’.⁶⁴ In these disclosures, which might apply to many social insects, aesthetics functions at a derivative level, effectively translating the insect’s existence into an anthropocentric knowledge construction: the honeybee remains either worlds apart (as in scientific categorization) or is metaphorically too close. By extension, the human–animal distinction and the nature–culture binary underpinning hexagonal imaginaries of the city remain undisturbed.

Darné’s relationship to the bee, however, signals a move beyond its representation in a purely aesthetic register. Neither metaphor nor allegory, through beekeeping a relationship is established between artist and insect which has material implications for both. In the first instance, Darné’s attention to the bee’s capacities — its social faculties and individual abilities — and the honeycomb which results, radicalize the artist for how they render the urban environment intelligible in unforeseen ways:

Les abeilles questionnent l’invisible, elles collectent leur butin dans un espace a priori imbutinable: la ville. Non seulement elles ouvrent l’imaginaire en déjouant les idées reçues, mais elles permettent d’entrer en relation avec le quartier sans être propriétaires du sol.⁶⁵

Encouraged by his first harvest, the artist expanded the number of hives and, over time, caring for more bee companions required Darné to seek the assistance of more fellow humans. Co-opting friends and other artists, by 2000 the group were tending to over 120 hives. What began with one beekeeper led, through necessity and interest, to a collective endeavour, which Darné formalized in 2003 by naming the collective the Parti poétique. From numerous hives across Saint-Denis, including an apiary positioned on the roof of the town hall as part of the commissioned project, ‘Pollinisation de la ville’, the group began to pot and distribute the honey under the label ‘Miel béton’.

These honey jars, which continue to be sold in Saint-Denis and across Paris, are indeed ‘things’, but are they works of art? On one level, to follow Heidegger’s enquiry into the difference between art objects and ordinary things, the latter ‘look at us’ from a position of ‘serviceability’; seen as some thing that in commonplace modes of attention performs a function and demands no further consideration than that service requires.⁶⁶ Understood thus, these jars of honey might be no different than any other pot of amber liquid spooned onto morning porridge. However, the ground of ‘serviceability’ begins to waver when we read the label on the jar, ‘Miel béton’, a tag which draws attention to the matters involved in the honey’s making; and this act of poiesis is where the honey jar becomes meaningful in new ways. Both compounds in themselves, ‘honey’ and ‘concrete’ are at once jarring, yet strangely similar signifiers. With miel attaching to organic substance, while béton evokes the artificial, placed together they disclose hitherto estranged imaginaries of liquid, amber, health, nourishment, and so on, at the same time as they evoke hardness, grey, dust, malleability, and modernity. Concurrently, the oxymoronic label draws attention to the similarities of these materials: in different states, both concrete and honey flow, albeit relatively sluggishly, and both embody significant amounts of ‘passive’ energy, although, crucially, honey can be easily reconverted to usable energy. This juxtaposition produces a kind of dissonance by suggesting materials which commonly belong to two different spheres of reference, so that through a poetic clash the urban epistemological separation of nature and culture is disturbed. Here, poiesis disorders the semiotic frameworks within which these separations operate, at the same time as it renders visible the fissure in commonplace imaginaries of urban space. And while miel béton resonates poetically with several aesthetic possibilities — we might imagine a honeycomb fashioned from concrete, or a hardened, crystalline mesh — the fact remains that this label attaches to a commonplace thing, to a jar of honey. With this recognition we are drawn to question the why and the how of this honey. Why ‘concrete’ when we taste honey? Where is the correlation? The label poeticizes the substance so that it begins the ethico-political work of rubbing against the grain of anthropocentric imaginaries, unsettling our commonplace separations of urban and rural, so that the honey jar becomes a medium with which to question the human–animal interrelations within this environment. In this mode of attention, we move away from scientific or metaphorical storying to the presence of a living animal whose capacities and creations — honey, wax — become material trajectories through which to rethink the naturalcultural geographies of the city.

How might such a rethinking be performed? We could, for instance, consider the sympoietic gestures at work in this making-with — the variable, combined vectors, intelligences, and possibilities of bee–human–city intra-actions that produce the assemblage of Miel béton. To unpack the energetic pulse of combinatory affects at work, we are required to honeycomb the thing itself, by which I mean track as best we can some of the contingencies, co-dependencies, and possibilities of the various actants involved in making Miel béton. Honeycombing in this case might take the form of an imaginative attempt to journey with the insect through the city, to track — with keen awareness of the impossibility of achieving her understanding — a single worker bee’s urban foraging. We begin, then, with a departure: a female worker honeybee brims from the hive to forage for food, leaving at specific times of day in synchronicity with urban flora producing nectar. With increased sensitivity to ultraviolet light, her visual range is attuned to the flowers’ colours and primed to associate various colours with potential sugar yield. Drawn above all to blue-violet, she learns to chart foraging routes by the hues of the most prolific flowers, and to remember and communicate to other foraging members of the hive these blue-violet pathways.⁶⁷ She navigates Saint-Denis by means of the Earth’s magnetic field, a geodynamic compass that assists her course to botanical landmarks, while her sense of smell means that she perceives not a single ‘scent’ but rather a whole range of airborne elements, undetectable to human olfaction, that emanate from the trees, plants, and flowers (see Figure 2).⁶⁸ This honeybee’s gleaning is a circadian exercise in gathering pollen — itself an assemblage of over 250 substances, including amino acids, triglycerides, phospholipids, vitamins, and macro- and micro-nutrients⁶⁹ — from the anthers of Saint-Denis’s botanical life. Mixing this pollen with a dose of saliva or nectar and placing it in her corbiculae (pollen bags), she navigates her way back to the hive, her hind legs filled with valuable pollen, her stomach filled with nectar. Once returned, this forager bee passes the nectar from her mouth to that of a house bee who continues this pattern until the sugar is sufficiently processed and ready to place into the hexagonal cells in the honeycomb, whereupon the bees fan the sugary substance until its water content reduces it to the consistency that we humans name ‘honey’. The bees then seal these cells using wax (itself a compound of ingested honey), thus preserving, through collective effort, the food that will sustain the hive through the flowerless winter.

Figure 2

 Honeybee foraging on a common borage plant. Photograph by Gillian Jein. Saint-Denis, 2024. © Gillian Jein.

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Equally, honeycombing would entail reaching across disciplines. To consider the knowledge of beekeepers, for example, who estimate that, in order to make around 500 g of honey within the 3 km radius of their urban hive, these bees will visit about 2 million flowers, flying 88,000 km, or twice the circumference of the Earth.⁷⁰ Entomologists have demonstrated that a bee’s sensory capacities mean that phenomena are not simply seen or touched, but a flower can be heard, and a single ‘scent’ experienced as dozens of perfumes; honeybees understand the city at a molecular level.⁷¹ They have studied how a honeybee’s harvesting alters the electrical state of her preferred flowers: the honeybee in flight is positively charged; when she lands on the (literally) grounded, and thus negatively charged, flower, she transfers her charge to the plant, transforming its fundamental, subatomic properties.⁷² The electrical imprint of one species onto another is just one disclosure amongst many of interspecies’ co-dependencies at molecular levels. Significantly, and in response to our opening questions, thinking-with honeycomb not only reveals entanglements, but it also volumizes our understanding of the effect of human infrastructures on such intricate relationalities. If honeycombing entails an imaginary of intersectional vantage points from which to understand the city, then from a bee’s vantage point the city becomes a vibrational ground for countless fragile harvestings. Instead of a flat, two-dimensional plane where everything has been discovered, in storying the relational agencies involved in Miel béton we discover an alternative ontology of the Hexagon’s capital city as honeycombed ground, pulsating in myriad interconnections, vibrational, patchy tessellations of intertwined topologies and living things. As Darné notes, Miel béton is ‘une éloge à la complexité’.⁷³

Honeycombing the Hexagon: agripoetics as response-ability

The human entanglement with this complexity becomes tangible in the Parti poétique’s pollen analyses of honey taken from successive harvests in Saint-Denis. Through microscopic identification of the species and genera of plants where the pollen originated (melissopalynology), these analyses have detected over 300 types of pollen in a single jar. In one of the most densely urbanized departments in France, with one of the highest concentrations of contaminated soils, these studies recuperate stories of remarkable botanical diversity.⁷⁴ Beyond their scientific value, the analyses attend to the specific human-animal, naturalcultural weave of this mellifluous assemblage. This is to say that, unlike scientific analysis, this microscopic attention to the pollen as actant takes care to avoid being bewitched by the tendency (also at work in some Actor–Network Theory) to dehistoricize and desocialize the thing in attending to the parts of the sum. Honeycombing would rather involve a thinking-with pollen that affords it cultural, historical, and political meaning by paying attention to the human vectors contributing to this honey’s diversity. The botanical assortment of Saint-Denis owes its variety to the mobility of its inhabitants, as Darné states: ‘L’homme étant aujourd’hui par sa mobilité, plus encore que le vent, un véhicule de grains, “ce butin de ciel”.’⁷⁵ Thus, to disclose the complexities at work in honey is to story in new ways the histories of migration and transnational mobilities of the communities of this town.⁷⁶ This mode of attention charts molecular compositions to trace an alternative botanical cartography that is inseparable from the cultural heterogeneity of human communities living in Saint-Denis, a town with over 135 different cultures represented in a population of just over 100,000 people living within 12 km². This is a ‘miel de voyage, produit d’un pays dont le terroir trouverait son origine dans l’origine des hommes’,⁷⁷ and so the dispersions at work in honey are storied too as human dispersal, along with different human traditions and choices around growing, cultivating, harvesting, and eating together. In this way, the bio-topological histories connecting plants, humans, and bees revealed in honey serve to bring the ideation of the Hexagon — its colonial past and postcolonial present — into view as an ecological, as well as a historical-political, phenomenon. Alongside the realities of pollution, oppression, and racism, honey as composition-in-motion accumulates additional modes of storying which multiply the agencies, intra-active possibilities, and response-abilities of people on the ground.

In concluding we broaden the horizon to point briefly to how what began as a singular harvest with Darné’s first hive has by now transformed into a major European initiative. While a full discussion of the projects underway at Zone sensible is beyond this article’s scope, the Parti poétique’s Banque du miel, which forms another part of the ‘Pollinisation de la ville’ project, is an important constituent in scaling the liveliness of honeycomb to the metropolitan and continental level. Since 2009, the collective has installed and cultivated hives around Seine-Saint-Denis, Grenoble, Lyon, Switzerland, and Norway. An interdisciplinary research project, it employs urban honey as a gauge to measure the city’s environmental health and richness, and positions the bee’s survival alongside the survival of humankind. Beyond harvesting honey, the project includes pollination and swarming as key activities to ensure the vigour of botanical and bee life, and to restore depleted honeybee populations in the countryside. In Banque du miel, honey is conceived as an ecological and economic asset; its amount, purity, and diversity are drawn into comparison with honey harvests from rural areas. So, while the yields of these urban hives have limited commercial value, they deliver four to five times the amount of honey produced by most industrial apiaries in rural regions across Europe, and in a chemically purer and more diverse form.⁷⁸ Storying urban honey in this way resonates as an inverse indicator of the environmental degradation that has resulted from monocultural industrial farming practices in rural areas, in which the absence of bees means a lack of pollination of vegetation. Here, the vital materialities of urban versus rural honey intersect with a historical materialism, where a political critique of agribusiness and its exhaustion of land to feed the city emerges: ‘car s’il est surprenant aujourd’hui de produire du miel en ville, il est bien plus inquiétant de ne plus pouvoir en faire sur les terres de miel de nos grands-parents’.⁷⁹ One of the missions of Banque du miel, therefore, is to raise awareness, to honeycomb urban spaces, and to encourage stories about the pressures exerted by humans on the environments they inhabit. This ‘Banque’ points determinedly to resources other than financial, to stores of narrative, of knowledges, and extends the ecological sensibilities cultivated at Zone sensible through activities which, taken together, constitute an ‘agripoetical’ engagement in urban ecological politics.⁸⁰ Through exhibitions, educational activities, and events, the Parti poétique collective encourages an ebb and flow between the farm and its urban communities, engaging the public and giving people the opportunity to respond to both the ecological and economic situations that shape their lives. Honeycombing then takes place through horticultural training, volunteering, cookery classes, or involvement in artistic practice (see Figure 3). In these agripoetical situations, participatory artistic interaction with the environment enables an articulation of what was hitherto invisible, unimaginable — the naturalcultural city, its uncountable relationalities and co-dependencies, as well as its fragilities and human response-abilities in the face of environmental damage.

Figure 3

 Children taking part in a beekeeping session at Zone sensible, ‘Les Petites Abeilles’. Photograph by Olivier Darné. Saint-Denis, 2024. © Olivier Darné.

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To conclude, as Amitav Ghosh has argued, the dominant stories driving ecological degradation and social injustice around the world are never simply stories in our heads.⁸¹ They are inscribed in the physical infrastructure of societies and consist in a failure of relation, a human unwillingness to acknowledge the complex co-dependencies and precarities that ensure life. Such co-dependencies are delicate, and human infrastructures disturb these ecological relationalities in unpredictable ways. As mentioned above, the ecological philosopher Anna Tsing has termed these disturbances ‘feral effects’, by which she means ‘the ways that living beings, as well as non-living beings, react to the kinds of infrastructural projects humans come up with’.⁸² This article explored initially how such failures of relation are built into the material discourses of much contemporary infrastructural planning, tracking the ‘hexagonality’ of sustainability imaginaries in Grand Paris. We sought then an alternative configuration, ‘honeycombing’, as a means to engage with the entanglements at stake in human–animal and naturalcultural interactions in the city, exploring honey as an assemblage through which this theoretical figure-ground might be materialized. Such a gesture assists in transfiguring the Hexagon’s elite imaginaries by moving us towards a re-cognition of the honeycombed ground of multiple interspecies entanglements through which the city comes to life. Thinking-with the honeybee is to disturb the hexagonal cartographies of Grand Paris and to thicken the present, so that space be reimagined as the vibrational ground of intersecting life forms and capacities that matter. Wherein human histories find new animal and botanical solidarities, and where acts of recuperation and pollination cultivate more-than-human empathies and new possibilities for action.

Footnotes