Royal Lady Sister

At 4pm today John Roach presents ‘Royal Lady Sister’ –

In this interview, artist Desiree Mwalimu Banks discusses the vibrational disruptions to honeybee well-being posed by telecommunication technologies, the need to re-establish the regal and matriarchal role of bees in our world, and the importance of deep listening in drawing nearer to the more than human.  The work she describes was developed with sound artist Grant Cutler during their Transmission Arts residency at Wave Farm in upstate NY.

Mwalimu Banks is a Zambian-born, East-Coast raised, artist, writer, curator, educator, diviner, and mother, whose work explores somatic relationships between indigenous identity, water ecologies, apiary culture, and the ecstatic, within the framework of the sacred feminine and the African diaspora.

The sound-world created for this work is derived from 5 years of sonic materials from projects by John Roach that focus on the relationship between humans and pollinators. Some of these sounds include:

• Honey burning on steel
• Bees and hives in Narrowsburg NY and Port Austin Michigan.
• Bee sounds re-recorded in a resonant abandoned radar station in Port Austin Michigan (thanks to Cindy Patrick at Port Austin AIR)
• Crystal Bowls, also in Port Austin (thanks to Beth Brilinski at Centered by Sound)
• Electrical lines in Chico California
• The sound of hot beeswax poured on speakers transmitting bee sounds
• Those same hot wax sounds radically and randomly jumping in time (bleeps, blips and bloops)
• Performance excerpts by the Foulbrood Orchestra at BioBAT Art Space in 2024. (Thessia Machado, Ranjit Bhatnagar, John Roach and Concetta Abbate)

Photograph by Bryan Zimmerman