Feli Navarro







Buzzing-With


[Open Studio, neimënster]
17.05.2026 @ Embellie Festival


Hi there, this is Feli Navarro :)

During my residency at neimënster, from 02.05 to 17.05, I developed a series of listening situations around bees and beehives—understanding them not only as “sound sources”, but as more-than-human societies that communicate through air, matter, vibration, and collective movement.

The works you will encounter here are built from field recordings made in and around beehives (neimënster and Apisjungels), interviews with local voices connected to bees, and studio experiments with resonance, vibration and spatial sound. This open studio shares an initial phase of my research: first materials, first questions, and first approximations to new ways of listening.

If you’re interested in seeing more of what happened during the residency—day-to-day notes, moments, and work-in-progress—I kept a diary in Instagram Stories. You can access it here: Residency Journal






Listening Stations





LISTENING STATION 1:
Headphones at the sofa
19 minutes
2 channels

A 19-minute audio collage composed from fragments of interviews recorded during the residency. 

Voices appear in this order:

  • Dr. Benjamin Rutschmann — Wild honeybee researcher
  • Victor Jungels — Beekeeper and owner of Apisjungels (Brandenbourg, Luxembourg)
  • Roger Dammé — Member of Mouvement Ecologique, volunteer at HoneyBee Wild Luxembourg, and beekeeper
  • Alexandra Uppmann — Artist working with drawing, installation and sculpture, with bees as a thematic focus

This station focuses on listening to knowledge, experience and situated stories—how humans relate to bees, care for them, and learn from them.






LISTENING STATION 2:
Wax speaker prototypes + exciters
4 minutes 47 seconds
2 channels

Wax “speaker” objects (ready-made wax sheets used for candle-making) activated with exciters, cables, and an amplifier. They play a 4:47 composition made from three field recordings.

To listen, place your fingertips gently on the hexagons: sound becomes vibration. This is a first approximation to another mode of communication—since bees also transmit information through vibration and propagation inside the hive. What happens if we try to meet that logic within the human listening field?







LISTENING STATION 3:
4-speaker sound installation
20 minutes
4 channels

A 20-minute quadraphonic composition built from recordings gathered during the residency, presenting different ways of recording and listening to bees:

  • bees “in the foreground” (the recognizable buzzing)
  • dense beehive sound (many bodies at once)
  • recordings made inside a beehive (including shotgun mic and contact microphones)
  • one earlier recording of a wild bee made in Mont Lachat (France)

The piece also includes the environments surrounding the hives: airplane sounds at neimënster, birds at sunset at Apisjungels, the river Alzette near neimënster, and moments where information becomes part of the soundscape—such as Roger Dammé explaining a swarming event and a colony that “moved in” to a dentist’s house roof, reassuring the owners that there is no danger and that the bees chose to stay there for the winter.

Throughout the composition, you’ll hear experiments with granular synthesis and surround panning, transforming field recordings into something new—another proposal for “new ways of listening”.

Score / timeline: At the bottom of this page you can also check the score, where the exact recordings are placed on a timeline and mapped to their channel (speaker). If you prefer, you can also read it in printed format in the installation: it’s on the window sill.


Score / timeline
for the 20-minute quadraphonic composition:

© 2026