Monarch II

Each year, millions of monarch butterflies embark on one of nature’s most extraordinary migrations, from a remote mountain forest in central Mexico to Canada and all the way back. No single butterfly completes the full round trip. Instead, it takes four to five generations: several short-lived summer generations traveling north, and one remarkable “super generation” that lives for up to eight months and flies south to the very forests its ancestors once knew.

These fragile creatures ride favorable winds and spiraling columns of hot air to conserve energy, gliding for hours with paper-thin wings across entire countries. Despite their delicacy, they cross borders, mountains, and vast distances—guided by the sun and their inner clock. Year after year, they find their way back to the same high-altitude groves, clustering in oyamel fir trees that have sheltered monarchs for countless generations.

To me, the monarch is more than a butterfly. It is a symbol of movement as a natural law, of resilience wrapped in fragility. In their epic journey, I hear echoes of human migration—of people carrying the will to survive and belong, even when the path is uncertain and the winds unfamiliar. Migration is not a crisis, but a rhythm of life. And like the monarchs, many who move do so not by choice, but carried by forces larger than themselves.

In this second chapter of The Monarch Project, I am folding twenty-five larger monarch butterflies using the techniques developed during Monarch I. This time, each butterfly is enriched with context: folded from a page of a Petit Nouveau Larousse Illustré (1934) containing a lemma that resonates both with our current time frame and with my personal journey of transformation. Each keyword becomes the basis of a title—such as Respiration, which gave rise to Make Every Breath Count.

Every butterfly and its source page are framed together in a black wooden block frame with museum-grade glass, uniting fragility and permanence, word and wing. The transformational process from page to framed butterfly is photographed and made available online through a unique code on each frame.