Glenda León (Cuba, 1976) after her participation at The Havana Biennial with Natural Mechanic, embarks a dialectical reflection on the fragility and strength of nature in a symbolic gesture of empowerment, the artist turns the butterfly wing dust in an imaginary galaxy revealing his allegorical power and revealing the invisible in our eyes.

Glenda León creates artworks in different languages like videos, photography, installations or public interventions in which she examined the relationship between artificial and natural elements where ordinary objects transform and reveal their metaphorical power. This capacity of creating new meanings through the contextualization, manipulations, and association of the objects work as a sounding board to question big questions. 

In Celestial Mechanics, the artist fosters a holistic vision of the universe: all beings were conceived by the same energy that the Cosmos was created. Thereby, the artist uses an infimum element as it is the butterfly wing dust to promote a metamorphic journey that raises ontological and epistemological issues. Glenda León amplifies the qualities of a fragile material in an action, almost scientific, of discovery and deconstruction of a butterfly from stages of approaches and scales. 

The use of butterfly wing dust on the work of Glenda León enrolls within that line of her work in which disputes the representation of reality through traditional means and assumes the use of unconventional materials as her own hair, flowers, feathers, cassette tape, gum or sand. The butterfly is a symbol of the empowerment of what we badly call ‘weak’; an increased fragility – in this case -, for the negative impact of the exploitation of natural resources. Perhaps, the importance is not valued in all its magnitude of the existence of the butterfly in vital elements as the contribution to the pollination of flowers, the inclusion in the food chain as nourishment for birds or insectivorous mammals an even as benchmark for ecosystem health scholars.

Glenda León presents her vision of life as a path of spiritual growth and the role that art may have in this process. The immensity represented by the wings of this little being can become a space to look, to find or to remember the infinite beauty that surrounds us and that sometimes it remains hidden from our eyes.