My hat is made of bleached newspapers from Bogota, Colombia, a megaphone sits in the hat’s top center. A handheld cassette player emanates recordings up and out of the megaphone. The recordings are of Alejandro David Osorio Pérez, my beekeeping mentor. I used audio to document each of our 182 work days together. Words begin to disappear in the final tapes. Osorio’s voice triggers the beekeeping gestures we created together during my apprenticeship. The work is about a foundation of relatedness, a way of being with and for one another.

Osorio cannot speak English and I cannot speak Spanish. The newspapers that make the hat are pages I slept on by night or wore in my shoes by day. Since we were communicating through our bodies, I hoped for Spanish words to enter my dreams, travel into my head, allowing me to speak with Osorio more fully. Never learning how to speak Spanish, I erased the print from the newspapers and practiced our beekeeping gestures in the Plaza de Bolívar each evening.

The performance witnessed is of me walking and gesturing the actions triggered, recalled through the recordings I made during my empathetic beekeeping lessons until I can no longer remember the gestural language shared with Osorio.