BUTTERFLY-BASIN

In Butterfly-Basin, artist and filmmaker Evgenii Muzalevskii returns to his family’s flat with a handheld camera. The starting point is formed by two words that sound alike in Russian: babochka (butterfly) and babushka (grandmother). This poetic slippage sets a shared artistic game in motion: the family fashions wings for the grandmother, the emotional centre of a tender metamorphosis. Employing the uncontrived language of a home movie, the cramped living space is transformed into a heady realm of imaginative possibility, where documentary intimacy gently gives way to utopian fiction. The act of making things beautiful becomes a gesture of survival, and family community forms the necessary basis from which a burgeoning larva can emerge and come fully to life through the creative process.

Antonia Bannwarth

Evgenii Muzalevski