Greta Mentzel & Heinz Mader

Heinz Mader discovered by chance a particularly beautifully shaped object, which prompted him to take a closer look. A small casing made of clay, about two to three centimetres long, with a round hole as an entrance. It is a very small clay pot that serves as a food-supplied incubator, a cocoon for the potter wasp, Sceliphron curvatum, a wasp with a migratory background: northwest India, Nepal, Kashmir, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan. Solitary and stateless, it was first recorded in Europe in 1979 and lives there without endangering other species.

An example of successful migration? Care, emancipation, hospitality, migration, depopulation, identity: topics that encouraged Greta Mentzel and Heinz Mader to carry out research, not on site, in Pakistan or Nepal, but in the minds of different people. From the questions and stories of these encounters came drawings, a film, a poster and a performance. Something was set in motion.

Caterina Laruccia – herself a ‘potter wasp’ – created drawings and became a protagonist in the film. Not only does everything that flies, such as an air-fraighted fruit, play a role in the film. But also what it means to migrate as a woman, to find images for the state of existing in the middle of nowhere, to transform, settle, live and die. ‘They lived here before us and they will outlive us. They have accompanied us since time immemorial, close and common like no other living creature,’ the poster by Heinz Mader quotes the anthropologist Hugh Raffles. At the end of the film, the sentence can be heard: “Combat is unnecessary. You should not get rid of them.”

Three insect masks were created, made in layers, like clay wrappers, and just as exotic, like the mason wasp, which anyone can be.

Greta Mentzel