On 19 May 2014, British multimedia artist Kabe Wilson presented the result of a five-year-long creative endeavour in one of Virginia Woolf's former Bloomsbury homes, as he displayed for the first time his recycling of A Room of One’s Own’s 37971 words into a novella-cum-art-installation entitled Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N'Gowfry. Yet, more than a mere exhibition, Wilson staged a performance art piece entitled “The Dreadlock Hoax ” which was conceived as a reversal of the “Dreadnought Hoax” in which Woolf had taken part about a century before. While dressed up as Virginia Woolf, Wilson proclaimed a speech which – unbeknownst to his audience – had been adapted, thanks to a few “phonetic tricks”, from Woolf’s “Craftsmanship”, a 1937 essay in which Woolf famously ponders on the fixity of literary works and words and wonders: “How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question”. Wilson's recycling of Woolf's landmark feminist essay into a story intended for the 21st century, which notably addresses Woolf's white gaze as well as the euro- and androcentric aspects of our literary heritage, provides an answer of sorts to Woolf's question and has been met with great interest by critics. Wilson's “Dreadlock Hoax” on the other hand has not yet been analysed in its own right, however it can be argued that a similar interest in our contemporary ability to negotiate past literary texts and authors informs Wilson's performative art and his phonetic recycling of “Craftsmanship”, as this excerpt taken from “The Dreadlock Hoax Speech” shows: “Words die if they belong so much to one world that they are unteachable to the next, or at least they become sunken memories. But the words of forward thinking writers live on further than most, meaning that they teach us about yesterday and we can use them to express the truth of to-day.” Interestingly, the artist's website argues that “The Dreadlock Hoax” highly relied on both the notion and practise of passing “not only in terms of race and gender, but also by arranging the language so that the audience sometimes thought they were hearing one word, when the artist was actually saying another”. Passing also takes centre stage in “The Dreadlock Hoax Speech”, as Wilson comes back on his recycling of A Room of One's Own and argues that his endeavour was to rewrite Woolf's essay in such a way that the recycling constraints he had set himself would not be noticeable by readers and that his work could be read as a novella of its own. If passing – be it in gendered, racial or literary terms – raises the issue of reception and, in the case of “The Dreadlock Hoax” of those who will or won't be tricked by the performance, this paper intended to analyse how Kabe Wilson's performative art paradoxically relies on passing as a form of counter-interpellation, a tactic which enables Wilson to talk back to Virginia Woolf in her own words while reclaiming his agency both as reader and artist in order to assert the necessity to keep interacting with past texts to better envision our future.