Artist’s Statement

Two maps

Papilio junodi, later renamed Graphium junodi, is a Mozambican butterfly named after a Swiss missionary – Henri-Alexandre Junod – who settled in Southern Africa at the end of the 19th century, a highpoint of the feeling of discovery in the field of natural sciences and the birth of museums as colonial projects. It is known to have been brought from the Morakwene forest on the Nkomati River in 1891.

This work was initially triggered by the absurdity of a lepidoptera from the southern African bush being afflicted by a foreign name – and by how this butterfly’s biography reveals a western and male need to domesticate, capture, classify, name and dominate the world.

Junod chasing butterflies
Junod’s assistants

This missionary worked with local assistants who were highly aware of every aspect of their environment, had specific skills but were mostly kept unnamed and unquoted. As another Swiss missionary, Georges Liengme, noted in his diary: “White people do not bother to learn the names of the natives. As soon as they enter their service, they rename them. There are ‘Six Pence’, ‘Spoon’, ‘Boy’, ‘Black Face’, whatever one can imagine”. The few traces of the names and achievements of Junod’s native assistants found in his writings lead us to think that the true “discoverer” of the Papilio junodi was most likely named Elias Libombo.

This work was initially triggered by the absurdity of a lepidoptera from the southern African bush being afflicted by a foreign name – and by how this butterfly’s biography reveals a western and male need to domesticate, capture, classify, name and dominate the world.

BUTTERFLY STORIES: MALAISE II is part of the wider artistic research project “Expanded Spectropoetics: In Search of a Healing Disorder”, inspired by the junodi to dive further into natural history museum collections and the double reality they embody: a biological one, as witnesses to the biodiversity of a time and space, and a political one, imprinted by traces of imperial history.

It aims to create and explore specific imageries that challenge normative representation and explore ways of decentring the gaze and un-othering, where speculative specimens embrace a cosmology in which representation’s visual, spatial and temporal stability are shaken through sensory perception.

Images featured in the book “Butterflies & Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries & Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa” by Patrick Harries, Ohio University Press, 2007.

Main theoretical references

Avery F. Gordon, “Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination”, University of Minnesota Press,1997.

Nastassja Martin, “Les Âmes sauvages: face à l'Occident, la résistance d’un peuple d’Alaska”, La Découverte, 2016.

Françoise Verges, “Programm of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum”, Pluto Press, 2024.

Patrick Harries, “Butterflies & Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries & Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa”, Ohio University Press, 2007.

Malcolm Ferdinand, “Decolonial Ecology. Thinking from the Caribbean World”, Polity Press, 2022.

Elio Della Noce, Lucas Murari (Hrsg.), “Expanded Nature: Ecologies of Experimental Cinema (Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image)”, Palgrave Macmillan, 2025

Working process

I see analogue images as an alter ego to the concept of memory, for their capacity to record and store, but also to interpret, decay, erase, lose. The emulsion as an organic surface usually needs to be treated according to very precise and scientific measurements, in terms of exposure to light, time and temperature of processing baths and the necessary quantity of component for each chemical element. It is the case mostly if the aim is to follow the purpose for which photography and then cinema were invented: showing “reality” as it is, disregarding the fact that every image is first and foremost a representation, a point of view.

Photochemical practices and expanded cinematics allow us to get distance from dominant narratives by hijacking the normative documentary-like aspect of images to create a speculative specimen, and activate haunting memories.

As opposed, the emulsion can be treated as a subjective living matter, a space for propositions to surface, allowing us to create, divert and distort existing or new images. Distort them through the way they are framed and exposed, through the way they are processed, and the way they are screened. Photochemical practices and expanded cinematics allow us to get distance from dominant narratives by hijacking the normative documentary-like aspect of images to create a speculative specimen, and activate haunting memories.

Laurence Favre

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