Les abeilles

The project began with two intuitions.

First, the architecture of the school: the yellow paintwork and the black charred timber on the façade. We quickly thought of bees, and then of the hive as an image of a collective place.

Bees fly to communicate. They trace precise trajectories: we observed them and simplified them into a small set of elementary forms that recur throughout the project—in the mobile, the typefaces, the movements of the mural and the lettering templates used during the workshops.

We chose to develop the work with the people who inhabit the school.

During a series of participatory workshops, we invited students and staff to imagine bees with real, unlikely or dreamt-up occupations.

Hundreds of words, ideas, images and fragments of sentences were collected. We then immersed ourselves in this material to compose a collective poem: a site-specific text that could not have been written anywhere else.

On the wall that welcomes students into the entrance hall, we created a large typographic mural inspired by the textual material gathered during the workshops.

In front of the wall, like a silent poem in response, a powder-coated aluminium sculpture echoes the forms derived from the bees’ flight. Suspended in the entrance hall, it gives off a faint buzz as crowds move through the space.

The project is built around two typefaces drawn from the same vocabulary of forms: Les abeilles Pochoir and Les abeilles Texte. Both are freely available on a dedicated website: abeilles.ramel-luzoir.com.

A way of allowing the work to circulate far beyond the walls of the school.

Les abeilles was created with Silvin Kutsch, who designed the mobile; Timothée Goguely and Antonin Gallon, who developed the website; and Romain Chabroux, apprentice graphic designer at ramel·luzoir.

The lettering templates were produced at Ateliers Éclairés in Strasbourg.

Commissioned by: Département de la Moselle
Client: SPL Moselle