MANUELA BRAUNMÜLLER

200 Million Years
2025

The project 200 Million Years takes its title from the long evolutionary history of butterflies, which have existed for over 200 million years – long before the 300,000-year history of humanity. This vast timespan stands in contrast to their current fragility, as the sixth mass extinction and the dramatic decline of insect populations threaten entire ecosystems. The butterfly symbolizes our ambivalent relationship with the natural world: we admire its beauty while bearing responsibility for the destruction of its habitats.
200 Million Years consists of several interconnected works and is a multimedia portrait bringing together different perspectives on the butterfly. Through the photo series Landscapes, 200 Million Years, Still Here, Complete World, the film Dreams Worth Remembering, and the poem Entirety, these works open a space in which questions of identity dissolve and sensory experience moves to the foreground. As a direct appeal, the poem Entirety seeks to hold the fear, frustration, and hope that arise in the midst of this unfolding ecological crisis.

Contingency Series

Imago Series

Dreams Worth Remembering Film

Still Here Series

Entirety Poem

Contingency
2025

An object from a different world. Formed shapes, lines, colors, shimmering glittering dullness. The non human, the weird, the alien. Telling us, that most of the time we dont know what we are looking at. I dont know what I'm looking at. But if I tell you, you are looking at the journey of a butterfly you would still wonder.
The story of the butterfly in one image. The remaining proof that transformation took place providing nothing but the unknown world. The possibility to break out from a place making us think inside it must be the deepest black, when in reality the light already came through the cracks you were just not able to see it yet. Things falling into place, somehow you got the chance to break your protection following something bigger.

Imago
2025

My eye wanders through landscapes of millions of shimmering scales. No ending in sight. I dont know who you are or where you came from. I dont know where you are going.
I dont know what I am or where I came from. I dont know where I am going. Wandering through landscapes. I've lost my knowing of who I am.

Landscapes, 2025

Dreams Worth Remembering
2025

Film 29:00 Min HD
My eye wanders through landscapes of millions of shimmering scales. No ending in sight. I dont know who you are or where you came from. I dont know where you are going. I dont know what I am or where I came from. I dont know where I am going. Wandering through landscapes. I've lost my knowing of who I am.

Music by Martin Croco in Collaboration with Maximo Cadell

Still Here
2025

When I look at you I can here your wings, I can hear your surroundings. Tender like the dead leaves of a tree. But somehow you shine like silver ghosts flying weightless.

Still Here, 2025

Entirety

This is not a story.
This is an experience.

This is not trying to explain.
This needs to be felt.

This is not a plan.
This is a possibility.

This does not need understanding.
This wants to stay safe as a secret.

This wants to exist even without us.
This just wants to live.

This is us becoming the astroid.

This is getting extinct within our systems, laws and beliefs.
This is fading away in our human perspective.

This could be liberated, if we dare to go slow, even if we may not feel permitted to.

This is a chance to come closer to ourselves, if we get involved with the other.
This is a chance to transform ourselves, if we dare to embrace beauty in its entirety.

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