Taking the World by Swarm

By Kate Sheppard

The Beehive Design Collective is a group of artists and activists based in Machias, Maine whose graphics center on globalization and resource exploitation in the Western Hemisphere.

The Bees are currently touring college campuses with their Plan Colombia banner, a 16-foot long screen print that details the complex political and social dynamics currently at work in the Andean region.

Plan Colombia is the U.S. government’s extention of the war on drugs into South America, promoted as a way to cut the drug trade off at the source. Since 1997, the govenment has spent more than $3.1 billion dollars to train and equip right-wing military and police in the country. But the complications of the Plan include the thousands of lives caught up in the war, with over 40,000 deaths and displacements to date. The grave political and ecological problems, not to mention the tremendous cost to U.S. taxpayers, make the situation in Colombia vast and complicated.

From the fumigation of drug crops and oil drilling to the training of Colombian paramilitary officers, the huge black and white display shows in dizzying detail and epic proportions the situation in Colombia. Beehive member Kehben Grifter sat down with Buzzsaw’s Kate Sheppard on a recent stop in Ithaca.

Kate Sheppard: What is the Beehive Collective and what do you guys do?

Kehben Grifter: We say that our mission is to cross-pollinate the grassroots by creating images that can be used as effective organizing and informational tools about the immense, scary, complex political issues that are going on in the world. To do this, we create alternative communication strategies by using images instead of words as a way to talk about these issues. The main thing our collective is known for is what we call graphics campaigns. This is our way of breaking apart complex political issues through pictures and showing how all the different single issues are connected so that people, instead of consuming something in a more bite-sized fashion and advertising model, can think about things in a more complex, elaborate system—because we all know that these things are very complicated and there’s not clear distinctions between the good and the bad necessarily.

KS: What would you say are the central themes of your graphic work?

KG: Right now we’re finishing up a trilogy about globalization in the Western Hemisphere, and so we’re trying to focus on the economic, military and development sides of globalization as they pertain to the Americas. Our big goal with this is to try to make tools that can be a bridge between people doing conservation and ecology work or activism and people working on the economy, because a lot of the time those two things don’t bridge very well. We want to make things that both those camps can use and build solidarity between the two of them.

KS: Can you explain the Plan Colombia banner a little bit? What are the key points and what are the dynamics of it?

KG: The graphic is really elaborately illustrated through requests and edits of people that we spoke with in the Andes. You’ll notice when you go through it that you won’t see some of the really overt stuff that if you asked an American what they know about Colombia, they would  say something like coffee or cocaine or guns or guerillas—basic stereotypes about the area. We wanted to take the opportunity to change what people know about Colombia, and that was really the only theory that we approached the situation with. And then luckily, when we were talking with people in the region, that wasn’t what people were asking us to draw anyway. What people asked us to draw a picture of was an illustration of the forces at hand that clearly show that  Plan Colombia is ineffective, is a waste of U.S. taxpayer dollars, and is a smokescreen for the resource extraction that’s happening in the region. We were really surprised to hear that. We didn’t know that Plan Colombia was really a war for oil or any of these things when we set out to make the graphic.

KS: The United States’ consumption of Latin American resources seems to be one of the common themes of your banners. How do you see this playing out in Colombia in particular?

KG: Most people we spoke to, when asked “Why is Plan Colombia happening?” would say it’s not necessarily about the amount of cocaine in the U.S. People would say that it was a move to get people off their land, to displace people, to make way for resource extraction, and people would go on and on telling us about different corporations in the region. That’s what we tried to illustrate—not only showing that specific symptoms on the land of these things happening, but also showing the larger problem of consumption in the same picture, so people can see how it’s working.

KS: What are some of the ways you see that the U.S., through Plan Colombia, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and now Plan Puebla Panama, is exploiting resources of other nations in the Western Hemisphere?

KG: With our current graphic about Plan Puebla Panama, we’re trying to illustrate how the current push for development in the region under the name Plan Puebla Panama is not only paving the way for the Free Trade Area of the Americas, but also for globalization, to sort of speed up the process of resource extraction in the region of Latin America. That corporate colonialism connects to the 500 years of colonialism…We’re trying to show how these things are connected in that long history and that whether the name Plan Puebla Panama sticks, that push is still going to be there. We also want to show the resistance to that, too, rather than just drawing a picture of the nightmare.

KS: What is the goal of having this campaign, of going around to colleges and high schools?

KG: A really important thing to us is being able to create images that are cross-cultural, using images that can be understood in both the north and the south of the Americas.

That’s why we have our strategy of, instead of drawing humans, we pick animals, plants or insects that are specific to the same bioregions as the people represented in the issue. This helps for people to be able to get past all the stereotypes that you would normally see with a theme of humans and be able to connect to the issue better. The graphics are able to be different things to different people, in different places in the world. Our tour is using these graphics as a way to talk about current events in a way that’s not so overwhelming and depressing for people, because that’s the sad state of affairs in the U.S.

A lot of people are finding it hard to be activists. If you’re paying attention, you’re probably not feeling so good, given all the things that are happening in the world right now that are pretty dark. Our message with going to schools is really to talk about these things in an alternative communication strategy that’s more healthy and helps with people’s attention spans, and is kind of like therapy, to talk about things that you have to talk about, but to do it in a way that doesn’t hurt so much, and in that way show people that there are other ways to mobilize people around these issues rather than just dumbing down the issues into just pictures, or just text, or just a lecture. Often, you’ll hear a lot of people complain that activists are pretty bad about hitting people over the head with information, so we’re trying to do it in a way that’s more responsible and more holistic.

Kate Sheppard is a junior journalism and politics major who thinks death squads are probably not the best form of diplomacy. E-mail her at ksheppa1@ithaca.edu.