Prespa's Butterflies

The Founding Gesture

This walk is the embodied introduction and the poetic threshold to my main performance, A Line to Cross, A Voice to Follow, presented at the International Walking Arts Encounters (WAC 25).

It is rooted in my 2022 performance, Ex-tracés. The journey I am undertaking is an inverted reactivation of a key stage of that epic walk, a symbolic return on my own footsteps to transmute memory through the present act.

The Protocol: The Dual Capture of the Living

During this 55 km walk, I implement a protocol of dual sensory capture:

• The Skin of the World (External Capture): The device is a Monarch butterfly cut from a special double-sided adhesive paper. One side is affixed to my clothing, while the other, exposed to the air, acts as a passive sensor that, over the kilometers, collects the invisible particles of the landscape: the dust of the path, the pollen of the flowers, and the micro-fragments left by the wind. It becomes the physical imprint of the territory upon me. The butterfly is a symbol of migration and resilience, echoing the cross-border nature of the Prespa region.
  
  

• The Pulse of the Path (Internal Capture): In parallel, I perform a continuous digital capture of my heart rate. Each beat becomes the fundamental unit of measurement for the journey.
  
  

The kilometer, an abstract and universal measure, is hereby abolished in favor of the pulse of the living.

I am no longer measuring distance, but the intensity of the path: the effort, the emotion, the response of my body to the landscape.

The Trace: A Two-Faced Memory

Upon my arrival in Prespa, this performative gesture produces two distinct and complementary relics that answer each other:

1. The Trace of the Territory: The butterfly itself, now a unique artifact carrying the physical and invisible memory of the landscape.

The Trace of the Body: The final record of thousands of heartbeats, a digital archive that quantifies not the distance traveled, but the emotional and organic cost of the walk.