Monarch I

In the first series Monarch I (2024), I folded twenty-four small monarch butterflies from a La Rousse Illustré encyclopedia. These books once bore the motto "Je sème à tout vent"—“I sow to all winds”—a fitting phrase for both the spread of knowledge and the quiet migration of ideas.

But the monarch butterfly was not chosen by chance.

Each year, monarchs undertake one of the most astonishing journeys in nature: crossing three countries and two continents, riding winds and spiraling columns of hot air. Their migration spans multiple generations, with butterflies traveling thousands of kilometers, only to return —sometimes generations later— to the very same forest in Mexico.

To me, the monarch represents more than beauty and transformation. It speaks of movement as an essential part of nature. Its journey is a living map of resilience, fragility, and belonging. And in that fragility, I see a reflection of the situations many migrants face today — forced to navigate shifting borders and unfamiliar lands, often misunderstood, often unseen.

These twenty-four butterflies are preserved in small glass bottles. Fourteen were given to people close to me, while the other ten will be released, one by one, beginning in October 2025. In this way I hope to quietly sow seeds of reflection. Each bottle will be left for a stranger to find — an invitation to see migration not as an exception, but as something deeply rooted in the natural world.

Monarch I is a story of flight, fragility, and the invisible threads that connect us across distance, time, and understanding.

If you would like to find one, follow @kaminoga on Instagram.