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Minerva Cuevas: Anarchy in the Hive

An extended essay on ‘Social Entomology’, an installation by the Mexican artist Minerva Cuevas. Social Entomology occupies a key place in Cuevas’ practice. It draws together many of the implications in the work that precedes it and it lays a foundation for the work that she has planned beyond it. It represents the culmination of a long period of collecting and research, extending her work far into new modes of display and subject matter. The installation itself could be considered in three parts – there is the sound piece, ‘Insect Concert’, which permeates the entire space; there is a set of six tables forming a circle in the room; and there are a series of floor based projection microscopes casting images onto the surrounding walls. ‘Social Entomology’ draws on a quotation from the German 19th century scientist, Rudolph Virchow, in which he compares human society to a large organism composed of interdependent cells. In my essay, I explore the installation in the light of works such as The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (1987) by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, two Chilean biologists, who developed a new biological theory of cognition in the 1980s. I also examine the wider political context that Cuevas is working within. I cite, for example, the children’s fables composed by the Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos which address current political issues within the limits of the traditional genre as in Durito III (Neo-Liberalism and the Labor Movement). In the final part of the essay I relate the work to wunderkammer and cabinets of curiosity, discussing the installation’s roots in traditions of scientific collecting. I also look at the work’s relationship to other recent pieces by Cuevas such as ‘Phenomena’, ‘La venganza del elefante’ and ‘Disidencia’.