'May Day' by Achinoam Alon at Lemoyne Project, Zurich

A slow drip of a viscous material congeals into a solid mass. Wax and honey are made by bees, specifically worker bees, whose hexagonal designs are arranged by the hive-mind. From the day of birth, these labourers are assigned with a societal order – a responsibility to their queen.

May Day is labour’s festivity, a celebration of production by the erasure of work. Abolishing work could be possible with automation, but today it seems more likely to experience the end of the world than the end of work. Never before have we toiled more hours under 0- hour-contracts and countless methods of social self-surveillance. Algorithms outpace our thinking, collecting online and offline “cookies” and replacing domestic labour. The female voices of our first mass-servants Alexa and Siri strive to seduce and to please.

Our unconscious desires surround us through targeted ads. Prediction itself has always been a business that homogenises the population. Fortune cookies were first served in San Francisco where today’s tech companies crowd the Bay Area. Like palmistry, or tarot, it is based on systemic methods of applying data and generalised formula – and yet what would happen if we knew the future?

Containing a fortune to fit demand – a reading of 2 degrees Celsius in the form of a high- end-fashion logo marks a dystopian present in which social action is relegated to corporate brands and thus dependent on profit motives. The “reading” of 2 degrees refers to our environmental point of no return – a universal prediction to which each individual will be undoubtedly affected in the not-so-distant future.

When it slowly melts, changes its outlines and transforms its shape as it approaches the water, does it remain the same as before? Scientific projections of environmental cataclysm strike no emotion. AI and jellyfish will survive in the future landscape – bees and humans will find a different fate. Sea-snail shapes adapt to the inside of our ‘ear snail’ of our inner ear. Beeswax scales to wax produced by the human body. A mechanical humdrum, Balenciaga- sponsored-apocalypse-shelters, larval bodies occupying hexagonal frames. Another May Day passes on our warming planet. The wax gets softer.