Luce Martini

Butterfly Eagle originates from a personal need to represent adolescence and its problems, while deliberately altering the filter through which these issues are usually observed. Rather than reproducing narratives of pathology, delinquency, or deficit, the work positions itself as a dedication to all the young people labeled as “difficult” or “problematic”. The title, borrowed from Muhammad Ali’scelebrated phrase “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”, is deliberately reimagined. The butterfly symbolizes fragility, metamorphosis, and beauty; the eagle, strength, dominance, and adulthood. In this sense, the title signals the central theme of the work: growth as a process of doubleness, where contradictory qualities coexist and transformation is born from tension. This tension captures the psychological reality of adolescence as a phase marked by instability but also by potential transformation. Adolescence, often stigmatized as crisis, is reimagined here as a fertile, turbulent space of becoming.