Iñaki Bonillas - Tineidae: Sermones del ilustrísimo señor

Signed & numbered edition of 100 (+7 A.P.)

The original idea for this project arose from a book of a Mexican poet, Ignacio Helguera, who mockingly observed that “moths show the writer that it is actually possible to make a living out of books”. With that irony in mind, I started to look for books that have been exposed to the devastative action of these indomitable book-eaters, and discovered rather interesting paths formed with amazing precision by moths in their wanderings around each book. There might not be a more precise representation of the passing of time that the traces left by these vagrants: true vestiges of a lifetime in miniature. As the dictionary warns: “moth is apply to anything that destroys something slowly and senselessly”, exactly as time itself does. That is why for Sermones del ilustrísimo señor, I chose to present not one but many subsequent pages of a book, in order to have a sort of a storyboard of the life of a particular family of moths, pacing up and down the book unceasingly. The title of the book had also an interest for the project, since sermon has in its Latin origin the meaning of a “stringing together of words”, and in a way that is precisely what moths do: nourish themselves word by word –just as a reader does.