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Artist: Maude Pilon
Interview: Sayaka Araniva-Yanez

Instagram residency and publication under the direction of France Choinière
Assisted by: Émylie Bernard
Design: Violette Moukhtar
Editing: Émylie Bernard, France Choinière, Joanie Demers, Emma-Kate Guimond, Jeanne Robichaud
Translation: Käthe Roth
2025
In English and in French
ISBN: 9782922135701 (EPUB)

Maude Pilon proposes to approach the Instagram Residency as an expansion of her current research on the phenomenon of attraction and phototropism. “Jeunes phrases sur les flammes”¹ et la farine will reflect on literary figurations of the moth – those who seek the light, and those of the pantry variety, who seek obscurity – piecing together the writer’s entomological observations and textual findings.

The writing grounds lay beneath nightime’s mock moon, and a moth-adoring literature is foraged.

Under the lamppost, the betrothed triphene is devoured by the illusion of safety - I look up the etymology of immolation and find immolare: sprinkling flour on the sacrificial animal - The chrysope, disoriented for days, no longer leaves the white wall ("in spite of the width of the sky”²) – It's mentioned that flour was also sprinkled in the sacrificial fire – The bark fly holds to the trunk, directly in the light beam of a narrow ray that manages to penetrate the canopy – I return to the path of my first entry, immolation, now not so much in the sense of sacrifice, but closer to the disaster of attraction – The aphid wants the bright flower – Before being devoured, the betrothed triphene quivers, frenetic - It's not a dance, but a panic – No longer literature, but derangement – The moth lays its eggs in the flour, but the moth's morning is its end – Each new day, at breakfast, there, where one has panicked, empathy is always already lacking.

An interview with Sayaka Araniva-Yanez elaborates on those notions, raised by Pilon, while capturing a shared perceptiveness. Their questions draw us into a fluttering dialogue between light and darkness.

1. Gaston Bachelard, La flamme d’une chandelle (1961).
2. Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942).