MOThS, MOuTHS and MOnTHS

Moððe word fræt. Mē þæt þūhte

wrætlicu wyrd, þā ic þæt wundor gefrægn,

þæt se wyrm forswealg wera gied sumes,

þēof in þȳstro, þrymfæstne cwide

ond þæs strangan staþol. Stælgiest ne wæs

wihte þȳ glēawra, þe hē þām wordum swealg.

“A moth ate words.” With these first words, the 47th riddle from the Exeter Book – a large codex of Old English poetry believed to have been produced in the late tenth century CE – heralds the central motif of MOThS. Like the moth in the riddle, the nocturnal exhibition feeds on literary sources, creeping like a thief in the night on a quest for words. The title of the exhibition draws on the French mots (“words“), and references The Death of the Moth, a title shared by two essays by Virginia Woolf (published posthumously in 1942) and Annie Dillard (1977). While Woolf observes the moth from her writing room, caught in a fragile struggle between life and death at her windowsill, Dillard describes its fatal attraction to a candle, an encounter that ultimately ignites and consumes its delicate insect body. Together, the essays present the moth as a literary symbol for both quiet transience and ecstatic self-sacrifice. Woolf and Dillard offer subtle yet gripping portraits of resilience, transformation, and mortality that simultaneously mirror the(ir) human condition and artistic practices – reflections on mourning and desire at the onset of dusk or dawn.

As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.

–  The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, Virginia Woolf, 1942

Both essays describe with great nuance and visual force the haunting yet enigmatic transformation from day to night, light to darkness, life to death. Within these tensions, the moth emerges as a shadowy metaphor for a psychological inquiry into sacrifice and obsession that also permeates myth, folklore and storytelling. One of the earliest recorded words for moths is the Ancient Greek ψυχή (psyché), first used by Aristotle, while Ovid describes them as funereal butterflies in his Metamorphoses (8 CE). The historical, taxonomical naming of certain moth species as soles likewise links them to the inner realm of the human soul. In the final passage of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), the Ghost Moth – Hepialus humuli – flutters at dusk over the heath, echoing the folkloric belief that this light-coloured species was considered the wandering souls of the dead. Across centuries and continents, through the oral tradition of storytelling, moths flitting around gatherings and casting themselves into the fire have stirred the imagination of many poets and artists, appearing as invocations of a MOre-Than-Human presence.

Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of pine.

–  Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard, 1977

With its fleeting lifespan, the moth instinctively orients itself toward the moon and the stars, yet it is precisely this ancient compass that tragically leads it toward the flame of a candle. This destructive attraction to light sources became particularly resonant with the rise and spread of electricity and artificial illumination during the Industrial Revolution, when longer – and thus more demanding – working days enabled ever greater pressure to be placed on labourers in the name of productivity. The image also appears in the writings of Karl Marx, who invoked the nocturnal insect to describe moments of historical transition. Contemplating the decline of older political orders and the emergence of new, aggressive forms of power, he wrote that “when the universal sun has gone down, the moth seeks the lamplight of the private individual” (1927). When the sun sets nowadays, the darkness of the night is increasingly banished by light pollution, impacting the well-being of urban residents and the habitats of non-human nocturnal species alike.

“The thievish guest was not at all the wiser for that, for those words which he swallowed.” This line concludes the riddle from Exeter Book, and is often read as an early evocation of the bookworm, or, more precisely in this case, a bookcaterpillar. As this insect is likely to increase its body mass by at least a thousand times after birth, one might imagine how many words were devoured in the course of its relentless growth. Only then is the caterpillar, or larva, ready to pupate, entering the miraculous metamorphosis that leads to an adult moth, or imago. This literary passage from ‘text’ to ‘image’, from assimilation to imagination, and the vast accumulation of words within the thievish guest, echo the continuous overflow of information that shapes, and at times destabilizes, contemporary life at an unsustainable pace. The imago’s longing for light is also reflected in our persistent attachment to the luminous glow of digital screens and mass media. It was also a moth, caught in the copper coil of a relay, that on 9 September 1947 became the first physical bug to seriously disrupt the operation of one of the earliest computers – the Harvard Mark II. As a civilization of human caterpillars, we are fed daily with horrific media coverage, further obscured by censored or deepfake imagery. Yet, like the caterpillar in the riddle, we do not necessarily become wiser through exposure to and ingestion of these cruelties. Nor do we succeed in forming a protective, safe cocoon within which the collective transformation of society might take place – one grounded in empathy, care, and trust – one that allows a new sense of belonging to emerge, unfurl its wings, and take flight.

MOThS does not merely illuminate the moth’s death, but rather its wondrous life cycle – from egg to caterpillar, cocoon to moth – within a mysterious transformation. Inside the cocoon, all cells of the caterpillar’s body dissolve into a formless mass, from which the body, limbs, and organs of the moth are newly constructed. Within this tension between destruction and becoming, the image of the moth also offers a key to an existential reading of the writings of Woolf and Dillard – who, throughout their work, repeatedly reveal both the spiritual gravity and mystical beauty of existence, as well as its irrevocable end. In the nocturnal exhibition, the artworks therefore trace and celebrate the different stages of the cycle amid this state of flux, proposing new arrangements of their cells. The chapel itself is approached as a giant cocoon, sheltering a moth and its symmetrical wings, in the process of becoming. Similar to the insect’s orientation to celestial bodies and its own anatomy, the architecture of chapels is often symmetrical, with the altar, or ‘head’, traditionally oriented toward the East, where the universal sun rises. The first night of the exhibition coincides with the new moon, invisible to the naked eye (while its full counterpart appears on the first of May, International Workers’ Day). Yet, even in the absence of the moon, moths continue to navigate by the faint light of the stars and other environmental cues, such as pheromones and the wind. On the darkest nights, their activity often intensifies, as they become less perceptible to predators, while in the city, artificial lights assert themselves ever more strongly as irresistible beacons that disrupt their ancient compass. Or, as Vladimir Nabokov – writer, devoted entomologist and discoverer of a moth species bearing his name – wrote as the last sentence of his dystopian novel Bend Sinister (1947) – “A good night for mothing.”