Monarch — Mariana Medrano

Monarch, 2025
Digital animation, duration varies.

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Installation views at Centro de Cultura Digital de México, displayed on 15.3m x 2.3m LED screen.

Photo by Dan San Vil.

Monarch engages with the way institutions preserve and share their collections, which reach the public in the form of dynamic bodies of information, objects, and meanings, shifting and recontextualizing through time. Embedded within this singular animation project is an exploration of how collections tied to government institutions within the postcolonial world aid in nation-building; in the case of the Cairo Agriculture Museum, how to forge a newly independent nation’s identity against the use and representation of natural resources. The projects highlights the precariousness of ecologies in the hands of state projects and the invocation of nature in conflicting political narratives.

Monarch was presented at the Center for Digital Culture of Mexico City in September 2025 and at Darb 1718 Space for Contemporary Art in Cairo in December 2025. The title comes from Cairo’s Agriculture Museum, where a display of pinned butterflies is arranged into different messages, some more ostentatious than others. An article in Bidoun magazine from 2008, titled “The Anatomy of Melancholy: Cairo’s Lost Agriculture Museum” by Clare Davies, tells how the configurations spell out political messages:

“Upstairs, exotic butterflies in a glass box have been arranged to spell Mubarak; another box displays the eagle of the Arab Republic of Egypt, and still another, the two-starred flag of the ill-fated United Arab Republic (1958–61).”