Guardabosques’ Meticulous Paper Portraits Celebrate Diverse Bat Species in ‘Little Friends of Darkness’

Bats can be found nearly everywhere on the planet, except for extreme deserts and the poles, and there are more than 1,400 species with an incredible variety of traits. The tiniest is Kitti’s hog-nosed bat, also known as a “bumblebee bat,” because it’s less than 1.5 inches long and weighs only two grams. Then there’s the giant golden-crowned flying fox, which boasts a wingspan of more than five feet and weighs up to three pounds.

For Buenos Aires-based studio Guardabosques, the mind-boggling variety of the winged mammals inspires Amiguitos de la Oscuridad, or “little friends of darkness,” a continuing project—with its own Instagram account—capturing expressive likenesses in meticulously folded paper. Juan Nicolás Elizalde, who is half of the studio’s creative team, began the series five years ago, fascinated by the animals’ myriad ear shapes, snouts, fur, and colors.

Where Desmodus rotundus exhibits large, pointy ears and a pale nose, Nycteris grandis’s powerful ears shoot up like a rabbit’s, and Anoura fistulata’s long face and tongue are perfectly suited for reaching into crevices to catch insects. In their Guardabosques’ guises, the specimens are crafted from colored paper precisely scored, cut, and folded to shape each characteristic detail.

If you’re in the Northeast, you can find a few sculptures at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, in the exhibition Bats!, which continues through July 28. Guardabosques is about to launch on Patreon, and you can follow updates on the studio’s Instagram.

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