Flesh, Decay, Maggots and Honey frames the ancient punishment of scaphism  as an allegorical lens for examining contemporary issues of exploitation, power  and ecological collapse. In scaphism, an ancient Persian execution method also  called “the boats,” the victim was trapped between two boats with their flesh  coated in honey to attract maggots and insects that slowly consumed the body  from the outside inward. Here, flesh becomes territory. Decay becomes a  timeline. Sweetness becomes a trap. 

Across the works of four artists, Burog Alvarado, Joe Geraldo, Minh Meo and  Mikiboy Pama explore this idea of slow violence through the lenses of  colonization, geopolitical power and climate catastrophe. These crises are not  approached as spectacular events but as cumulative and systemic processes of  erosion. The exhibition explores the overlap between body and environment  where the body reads like land and the land reflects the body. 

Maggots operate not merely as symbols of decomposition but as agents of  exposure, making visible the hidden labors of extraction, the residues of  exploitation and the afterlives of imperial systems. Decay is not natural failure  but evidence of systems pushed beyond their limits. 

Honey circulates through the exhibition as a material and conceptual  contradiction. While historically associated with healing and abundance, within  scaphism it becomes the catalyst for suffering. Here, honey represents modern  promises such as development, technological solutionism and managerial  control that claim to fix problems while often causing more harm. Sweetness is  layered over injury. Illumination hovers over collapse. What appears as care is  inseparable from consumption. 

These works ask what it means to live inside a system that feeds on itself. They  probe who is coated in honey and who is left to rot and they consider what  forms of power rely on slow consumption rather than open violence. 

Flesh, Decay, Maggots and Honey does not offer resolution. It stages a body in  suspension between flesh and ruin, sweetness and infestation, mirroring a world  caught between ecological breakdown and the fragile hope for clarity. Honey  glows not as salvation but as a fragile light within decomposition, asking  whether awareness can still interrupt the cycle of decay or whether we are  already floating inside the boats.

Written by Intel Lastierre