Butterfly Stories: Malaise II
Director
Laurence Favre
Switzerland, Germany / 2026
Loop
/ Without dialogue
This multi-screen installation uses analogue slide projection to create layered, fragile images of butterflies hovering in space. The work addresses natural history museum collections, with photochemical practices and expanded cinematic arts to activate haunting memories of the forthcoming. Butterfly Stories: Malaise II engages in a process of unarchiving through the creation of speculative specimens with an imagery aiming to disturb the stability of representation’s visual, temporal and spatial logic. The work challenges conceptual binary oppositions – presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, moving and still, between memory and oblivion, real and fictional, and maybe even between life and death – suggesting instead an expanding continuity that summons the ghosts.
The emulsion acts as an alter ego to the concept of memory able to record and store, but also to interpret, decay, erase and lose. It serves as a subjective living matter, a surface to create and distort dominant narratives by hijacking the normative documentary aspect of images. Malaise is the word for a tent-like structure made of polyester netting, used to capture insects. In French, it means unease, discomfort, awkwardness.
Presented with the support of Pro Helvetia, Schweizer Kulturstiftung.
Laurence Favre is an artist, filmmaker and researcher working with analogue still and moving images, sounds and writings. Her work takes the shape of experimental and non-fiction films, installations and film performances. She looks into the materiality of the image and its interaction with the screening surface to hijack the documentary form and question the notion of representation. Her work has been shown at film festivals (Locarno, IFFR, Ann Arbor and others), art spaces, informal venues and in the frame of symposiums. She is an active member of the artist-run filmlab LaborBerlin.
Director Laurence Favre. Cinematography Laurence Favre. Editing Laurence Favre. Producer Laurence Favre. Production companies Laurence Favre (Genf, Switzerland), Virgule Films (Genf, Switzerland).
Films: 2013: Nwa-Mankamana. 2017: Résistance / Resistance. 2018: In Loving Memory of the Future. 2022: Osmose / Osmosis. 2024: Zerzura. 2025: Lettres au Docteur L / Letters to Doctor L. 2026: Butterfly Stories: Malaise II.