Butterfly stories / Malaise – 240 slides, 3 slide projectors, 3 motorized shutters, 3 entomology fabrics, 6 candles, stones, rope – loop – 2024
Malaise is part of the wider artistic research project Expanded Spectropoetics: Towards a Speculative Decolonized Archive by the creation and projection of images bluring temporalities and challenging conceptual binary oppositions such as presence/absence, visible/invisible, moving/still, real/fictional, living/dead. Here they are rather seen as continuities, by summoning the ghosts.
As a starting point, butterflies of natural history museums are photographed on celluloid film. Their images are copied through different techniques and light exposition, including UV, to which butterflies are sensitive. The new images are screened on fabric normally used to capture insects. Here the new specimens experience a double reality : caught on the surface, and making their way out.
Malaise is the word for a tent-like structure made of polyester netting used to capture insects. In french it means unease, discomfort, awkwardness.
This phase of the project was developed thanks to the S.P.A.C.E residency – Berlin, in the frame of SPECTRAL