API-LOGO

MUSEO ORTO BOTANICO ROMA

A work created with the living, not merely placed among it.

Here, the living is not represented: it inhabits the work, moves through it, alters it, makes it unstable. The sculpture ceases to be an object and becomes a place, built on two convictions: that the planet is a living organism, and that human history cannot be separated from its relationship to the ecosystems that sustain it. Its blackened wood carries the trace of the Anthropocene, combustion, consumption, exploitation, yet the work does not propose a romantic reconciliation between humans and nature. It asks instead whether coexistence is possible, opening a phase of observation and listening, in which the bees' movements, vibrations and dances are approached as a highly structured, non-verbal form of collective intelligence.

API-LOGO, its title a contraction of the Italian api (bees) and epilogo (epilogue), is a 260 cm figure of Apollo, permanently installed at the Orto Botanico di Roma (Sapienza Università) since May 2026, suspended between three trees. Carved in wood and burned using the Japanese shou sugi ban technique, its outer skin evokes an open nest, fragmented into three irregular parts, like the remains of a structure in explosion, its surface deep, black and vibrant, a memory of fire and a trace of transformation. Inside, the three elements are carved into a succession of honeycomb cells, echoing the organic, structural and fragile perfection of the bees' hive. At its heart, an invisible metal structure is concealed by a multitude of bamboo canes, inspired by Yona Friedman's "favela des abeilles," forming a modular habitat for wild bees that can be renewed each year.

Installed at the heart of the garden, the work invites reflection on the links between art, ecology and biodiversity, and on the essential role wild bees play in the balance of ecosystems. The sculpture becomes a threshold between the human and the more-than-human, a classical figure inhabited, in real time, by a living colony, as the piece stands in the garden.