Shape Shifters. Nanna Debois Buhl (DK)
New ‡ DobbeltDagger release
Press release (excerpt): 'Metallic, metamorphic, inconspicuous. Moths are the nocturnal siblings of the butterfly in the large family of winged insects known as Lepidoptera—all sharing the trait of scaled wings. There are about 136,000 different moth species, most of them operating by night.
Moths are the small, shimmering creatures we dread finding in our closets and cupboards, where they chew through wool and leave their eggs in our flour. They are the tiny trespassers that museums go to great lengths to banish: freezing textiles before they ever reach the archives to ensure no moth, larva, or egg remains hidden in the weave. However, moths are vital actors in countless ecosystems, serving both as pollinators and as prey for birds and bats.
Moths are also the protagonists in my work Shape Shifters, where they appear as textile motifs, bugs in the system, and messengers of environmental change. Spanning digital algorithms and handwoven textiles, Shape Shifters connects the binary logic of computing with the ancient craft of the loom. The work was sparked by my encounter with Danish artist Ragna Braase’s luminous, pixellated weaving Natsværmere [Moths] some years ago. Not only did the encounter with Braase’s weaving awaken my desire to weave, but it also recalled the 1947 anecdote of a moth fluttering into a Harvard computer—taped into a logbook by the programmer and famously noted as the “first actual case of a computer bug.”'
—Nanna Debois Buhl, 2026