Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

Watch An Apex Melody/Predator Dyes/Vultures Eat The Body/Flys (2021) by Franky Cruz, the first video in the museum’s fourth season of Digital Commissions.

An ode to the circularity of life, An Apex Melody/Predator Dyes/Vultures Eat The Body/Flys merges two time-lapse videos simultaneously depicting moments of death and rebirth. As vultures devour the remains of an alligator that has been decapitated by a combustion fueled guillotine and left on the side of the road, two monarch butterflies—raised in the artists’ Vivarium Meconium Lab—emerge out of a chrysalis, reborn from the death of their larval stage. Inspired by the ancient Tibetan sky burial practice, in which a human corpse is left on top of a mountain to be exposed to the elements or eaten by vultures, Cruz’s piece reflects on corporeal sovereignty and nature’s innate processes of transmutation.