Hubert Duprat has been inveigling caddis larvae to make precious cases since the early 1980s. In 1983, he filed a patent application. In tandem with his work as an artist, he felt a need to find out about this animal, the caddis fly (order Trichoptera), and discovered to his surprise that others before him – Miss Smee, for example, in 1863 – had conducted in vitro experiments. It was then that he began to systematically lay his hands on anything and everything he could find about caddis flies, not as an entomologist, which he is not, nor even as a specialized ethologist, but out of pure curiosity. Because what interests him above all is the larva and its ability to manufacture a case.  This is how the impressive, and obsessive, Trichoptera Centre and Library has come into being.

Aquarium. Art, decoration and ornamentation. Christian Besson. Library. It’s glue that makes the collage. What it takes, what is given. What they do with it. Celebrities. Beginnings. Covers, title pages. Crystal Palace. On both sides of the surface. Scale. Education. Experiments. Exhibitions. Jean-Henri Fabre. Factory. Fictions. Fossils. Inventing or discovering. Swainson’s mistake. The Grotto and the Prisoners. The moving grove. The Great Architect. Great narratives. The words and the thing. Magnifying glasses, microscopes and X-rays. Metaphors, allegories and parables. Jobs and qualifications. Miss Smee is me. Moderns. Mosaic, stained glass and marquetry. Gold and Precious stones. Nobody else. François Jules Pictet de la Rive. Pop. Prêt-à-porter. Réaumur and variations. Reserve and disappearance. Grasping. Session with Six. Sedges. Sequences. Sixty-five years of group photos. Stations. Yokota.