Project

Living Colour Flies

Land

The Netherlands

STARTEL — the artist duo of Jan Starken and Mark Schotel — explores life and its inevitable finiteness through the recurring motif of the fly. The bluebottle fly (Calliphora vomitoria), living only seven days yet driven by an intense will to live, becomes a symbol of both vitality and death. After years of breeding and experimentation, STARTEL learned to influence the flies’ behavior, transforming them into active, living elements within their installations.

The Living Colour Flies installation at BioArt Laboratories focuses not only on the life of the fly but also aims to capture its traces. As an ongoing project, the traces of the fly is captured with a different substance in 2025. In previous installations, such as The Meaning of Flies (Verbeke Foundation opening exhibition 2007), traces were captured daily in fluorescent paint, and in Time Flies (2009), these were captured in Indian ink.