Read The Death of the Moth aloud on a late summer evening on the banks of the Nérac Ponds*; begin this reading with the words “Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths”**; immerse yourself in the rhythm and accents of the multiple voices of the readers gathered for this collective reading; later, reread The Waves by yourself while learning about the first title that Virginia Woolf gives to her writing project, The Moths, as announced in her diary: “Now the moths will I think fill out the skeleton which I dashed in here: the play-poem idea: the idea of some continuous stream, not solely of human thought, but of the ship, the night&c, all flowing together: intersected by the arrival of the bright moths”***.
The sound of waves can be heard in the distance; a moth bangs against the glass; it seems we can perceive the movement of waves on the ponds’ surface. In this exhibition, the artists and their works freely invoke The Waves and seize upon this double dimension of a novel with two faces, The Moths—The Waves, like the two sides of a coin. Streams of consciousness come and go, colliding in a continuous current, that of the sea, water and the irrevocability of time. And then: “Night opens; night traversed by wandering moths.”****
The moths are as much the voices of the six characters featured in The Waves—Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis—cast into the exhibition as the subjectivities expressed through the artworks. Whether through the prism of the fascination for water, the disappearance of bodies, the monkeys of Gibraltar, or a moth darting against the hardness of a window pane, the exhibition unfolds in the spaces of the art center in a movement of ebb and flow through which Virginia Woolf’s voices can be heard: “And now I ask, ‘Who am I?’ I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. […] There is no division between me and them.”*****
—Richard Neyroud, September 2024.
* Collective reading of Virginia Woolf’s The Death of the Moth (1942), organized by the CRAC Alsace team on September 4, 2024, at the Nérac Ponds Bird Observatory in Altenach.
** Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth (London: Hogarth Press, 1942).
*** Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3: 1925-1930 (Boston: Mariner Books Classics, 1981).
**** Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1978), 177.
***** Woolf, The Waves, 288.
The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.
