Denudation
Remembering the monarch butterfly's migration through five generations from Canada to MexicoMonarchs cross a continent guided by generational memory, still swerving around a mountain that vanished long ago. Step inside the detour, inside an absence that navigates.
Context
Every autumn, a monarch butterfly leaves Canada for a forest it has never seen, and will never see. The monarch's migration to central Mexico is completed not by one body but by five generations, each born mid-journey. Crossing Lake Superior, they swerve a long arc around open water, around nothing. Some believe they are avoiding a mountain that no longer exists. In this reading, the butterfly becomes an archive: a creature that carries the shape of a vanished landscape inside its body, appearing and disappearing across a continent, dying into its own continuation.
Why
I am drawn to forces that oppose and complete one another. The monarch's flight holds all at once: a disappearance that is also an arrival, a death that is also a continuation. The ghost mountain suggests that space is never empty. I wanted to utilise dark spaces not as a background but as an actor. Visitors stand inside the detour around the mountain, inside the negative space the species still honours. The piece asks what we ourselves navigate around: which absent mountains shape our own trajectories, which memories travel in us that we never made.
How
The visuals were built in TouchDesigner. Particle systems drive the swarm behaviour. Strange attractors simulate wing-scale turbulence and larger climatic drift, while colour and luminance respond to the swarm's density. The output is rendered as four synchronised video streams composited within TouchDesigner, mapped to the projection architecture of Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig's immersive hall. Spatialised sound designed by Carlos Velandia. Mountain texture by 고휘 Kohui.