The recent discovery of Nabokov’s butterfly drawings together with photographs of different species of Lepidoptera found on the net are the inspirational sources of Halilaj’s series "Moth", made up of meticulous drawings in pencil or ink. With their delicate lines, they resemble scientific drawings like those made by explorers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when they discovered new species of animals. Halilaj’s ink drawings are particularly influenced by the graphic work of the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, whose encyclopaedic plates showing birds and Lepidoptera can be found piled up around Halilaj’s studio. The sheet of paper is like a space in which the insects seem to be resting.
Petrit Halilaj has made cases for each of them out of recycled wooden crates and packed them under traditional Kilim rugs that partly cover, partly reveal them. Making costumes with his mother in Prishtina and makeshift wooden crates in Runik like the ones he used to make with his grandfather testify to the importance of his homeland, his Heimat, and of the notion of identity in his work. Where the family home is imagined as a workshop, each step of the project becomes the pretext for an intimate dialogue with his origins and for a return to the innocence of childhood, as if it was a matter of harnessing creation to practice an ‘invisible activism’ capable of ‘transforming the future world little by little’.
This series is based on the project Petrit Halilaj presented for the 57th Venice Biennale, where the pieces were initially made of Kilim rugs from Kosovo that he cut up and stitched together with his mother in order to turn them into moths.