The Department of Artificial Butterflies (DoAB) is a part of a larger project that aims to create a Museum of UnNatural History. The Museum will advance its global mission to discover, interpert, and disseminate information about human contemporary cultures, the natural world as we reproduce it and ecology through a wide-ranging program of scientific research, education, and exhibition.

 

The DoAB aims to research animal issues in contemporary art in relation to John Berger's text "Why look at animals" which examines some of the most important concepts in social theory and philosophy such as the action of the gaze, the relationships between humans and animals in society as well as the objectification of the animal and the distancing of the human from the animal.

 

Human's love affair with butterflies spans thousands of years. Throughout history, they have been included in mythology, depicted in art, and written about in literature. Paintings of butterflies go as far back as 1350 B.C. in Thebes, Egypt, and the Greek word for butterfly, psyche, is the same word that is used for the human soul. Ecologists have learned that some butterflies' spectacular wings are brightly colored to indicate that they are poisonous or unpalatable, while other innocuous species mimic the appearance of poisonous ones. Some have brilliant eyespots that spook animals into believing that the butterfly is much larger than it is. It is ironic that the butterfly's beauty, which originally evolved to ward off predators, has attracted the attention of the most formidable predator of all: mankind.

 

Αs a consequence, the contemporary market followed and imitated the beauty of this species, overproducing the morphological characteristics of the butterfly in all kinds of jewellery, clothing, functional objects and ornaments of all kinds. Metals, ceramics and textures were the commonly used materials in the beginning and as we reach the contemporary era plastic dominated.

 

The butterfly collector McWilliams mentions that “as populations decline and young people become more disconnected from nature, they may never know butterflies as intimately as he does. “Our generation is the last generation of insect collectors. The younger generations are just pulling further and further away from the natural world," he laments.

 

DoAB team’s mission is to create a direct comparison between the real natural world and artificial artefacts that imitate it, emphasising the ways we reproduce and use nature. The aim of our museum is to leave a legacy for the next generation and to facilitate the study of how people, craftsmen and then factories copied the butterflies to decorate their lives, their homes, their bodies, their parties and to explore the materials chosen to reproduce something natural into something artificial.