Watching: The Incantation of Gradiva

Overview

Operating as a mythopoeic film, the sacrificial script is imposed upon the feminine. Drawing on the spirit of Helene Cixous's fascination with Wilhelm Jensen's Pompeian fantasy novel Gradiva, as well as on Sigmund Freud's essay Delusion and Dream..., these moving images interrogate theological narratives that have historically conscripted women into cycles of self-erasure. The camera acts as an incantation, invoking and releasing an untethered Gradiva carried into non-linear time. Through division, dissolution, a Third Body, and through becoming, the body emerges as a medium that generates language through transmission and renewal.