Kill All the Butterflies to Prevent a Tornado, 2025

 

118x168cm diptych

dead plants, sand, gesso, mineral pigments, watercolour on wood

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​Kill All the Butterflies to Prevent a Tornado confronts the violence of forced simplification. Drawing on James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, the work critiques how states and corporations translate complex ecologies and communities into neat categories, then manage them through grids, measures, and monocultures. Forests are reduced to fast-growing, profitable species; cultures and needs are stripped of nuance in the pursuit of order and control. The same logic infiltrates contemporary politics, where conflicts are flattened into hashtags and identities into rigid categories. Against these regimes of legibility, the work asserts the force of the unruly, the opaque, and the fragile networks of life that resist capture.