Affective Ecopolitics in Rhythmic Assemblages: Wolfgang Buttress’s The Hive

This paper investigates Wolfgang Buttress’s art installation The Hive, which features a musical soundtrack recorded in cooperation with a colony of honeybees. Drawing on Deleuze’s theory of affect and Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, it argues that sound within the installation acts as a material–energetic force that modulates bodily capacities to feel, think, and act. As such, The Hive can be said to enact a form of affective ecopolitics, whereby the coexistence and codependence of humans and nonhuman others are made perceptible and directly felt on the body through processes of rhythmic attunement and co-becoming with bees.