At its heart will be 50 or so large-format photographs that showcase beauty and diversity, full of intricate shapes and vibrant colors. “The sheer variety of shades and shapes on view in a larger scale captivated me right from the start,” photographer Carolin Bleese explains. “It’s the combination of clarity and depth of field that make these beetle photos by Carolin Bleese unique,” Nicolas Gompel adds. “I hope that the artistic approach she’s taken will help all visitors to see beetles in a new light—literally.” The geneticist says that he fell in love with beetles when he discovered a stag beetle in his youth. And, over time, he has built up a collection of beetles from all over the world. Says Gompel: “To this day, beetles—their beauty, their origins, their structures, their colors and their distribu-tion—still inspire my research into the genetic foundations of life.”
One species of beetle is even named after him: when the genus of beetles originally known as Xy-lophilus had to be split into several genera, the Spanish researcher Miguel Angel Alonso-Zarazaga christened one of the newly created ones Gompelia. “I feel highly honored to have had a genus named after me,” Gompel says. Several species have now been classified into this genus. Mean-while, Gompel and his colleague Holger Kliesch published a paper on Gompelia ruficollis, a species of beetle from the Mediterranean, which has now been found in Germany for the first time. This marks a significant increase in the geographical range of this species, which had colonized the Near East and the northern part of the Mediterranean Basin and had previously only been spotted in Italy—not in Germany.
A transdisciplinary approach
For the University of Bonn’s Collection Coordinator Alma Hannig, who is also Managing Director of P26, this show will be the second exhibition that she has curated and coordinated following “Stories of Objects” on the topic of provenance research. “This exhibition is all about transdisciplinarity, which is always a key factor for special exhibitions in P26,” she explains. “Experts and early-career researchers from the fields of zoology, agriculture and teaching are contributing their knowledge and their specimens to the exhibition and showcasing the work they’ve been doing with beetles.”
Some photographs will also be accompanied by slides of the original beetles, while other speci-mens have been turned into 3D scans and larger-than-life models. Media stations will give visitors an insight into the scientific work that the researchers at the University of Bonn do with beetles, e.g. preparing a slide.
