What’s in a name? For Marguerite Humeau, a shared prehistoric language, a collective future and the structure of her latest exhibition at The White Cube. Meys, meaning to mix or bring together in a hypothetical Indo-European language, is a multi-disciplinary body of work that imagines what insects could build with the remains of a human world.




Humeau’s exploration begins in an unlikely place – at North Peckham Civic Centre. Slated for demolition, this former community hub features a mural named The History of Old Kent Road, by Polish artist Adam Kossowski. Here Humeau flips the script, summoning our own destruction in the Centre’s place, through employing a generative AI that resurrects Kossowski’s intelligence to erase the mural’s human figures. The resulting study is defined by absence.
This act of literal de-centring is a prelude to Humeau’s immersive worldbuilding, made possible through the work of dozens of craftspeople. Visitors enter this world through a low-ceilinged passageway built into the exhibition space, where the artist’s film Collective Effervescence plays. This video tracks spectral termites as they tend to their gardens, combining the uncanny not-quite-rightness common to AI renderings with the lively dance of a collective building towards release.
The passageway opens into a dimly-lit atrium, populated by mushrooming sculptures made from wooden nets, clay vesicles, beeswax gills and bubbling glass. These hybrid forms are the synthesis of familiar materials, totems of an insect society that creates, consumes and shares the sticky-sweet products of its collective labour.






Some of Humeau’s pieces, like The Forager for Honey, allude to a more sexual means of production, featuring undulations of walnut wood and honeycomb holes. Others, like The Holder of Wasp Venom and Fallen Leaf V, offer places for insect citizens to hide their goods – and themselves.
Humeau’s Guardian sculptures feature prominently here, their crystalline protrusions and stacked plates protecting gardens of fungus. Guardian of Ancient Yeast and Guardian of New Yeast oversee the gallery space, each thrumming from within with sounds created by experimental musician Bendik Giske, intended to recreate the reverberations of termites hard at work. Both offer up globes of blown glass from their folds, encasing tiny quantities of yeast – essential ingredients for the bread and beer that fortify our own society.
This exhibition is an ode to craft and collectivity; between musicians and technicians, researchers, AI and artists living and dead. Humeau invites them all to partake in her speculative constructions, which feel organic and hopeful where it would be easy to slip into fatalism. Meys mixes art, science and tactile optimism to imagine a way we might tunnel out of a dark destiny and into the light.






Meys is on view at White Cube Bermondsey until 14th May.