9. Gradiva Out of the ashes steps Gradiva. Gradiva, variously translated from Latin as “she who steps along,” “a woman who walks,” “the one who advances.” Gradiva, bridging the worlds of psychoanalysis and archaeology, two fields concerned with the return of what was once buried. Gradiva, a goddess figure in a Roman bas-relief, named by Wilhelm Jensen in his 1903 novella, Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy , read rapturously by Freud, who psychoanalyzed the protagonist and published his own interpretation, “Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva,” believing this literary work was a perfect illustration of psychoanalysis as a science of love, a “cure by seduction.” Gradiva, the replica bas-relief that Freud buys in Rome and hangs over the couch in his office. Gradiva, heralded again by the Surrealists (especially Breton, Dalí, and Duchamp) as Diva-Muse, able to walk through walls, the axis of fantasy, helping the painter and poet penetrate the divide between reality and dream. Pompeii comes alive for every generation who handles its material. It is rediscovered over and over as perceptions change. Like the wise Fool of the Tarot deck, who carries their past along with them so that, at any moment, they can reinterpret it and give it new meaning. All treasures transform with each era’s biases, excitements, and humility before mystery. The fragment’s broken contours invoke the continuum, the chance to link it up with something else and generate an event, a cosmos, an atlas for a moment. An exhibition is a finite episode, a temporal road map to the stars, along which I hoped to track a potential route through and between other episodes, which explode and reiterate the potential of the other. “To stage is to love,” to quote the curator Harald Szeemann, and this exhibition ends back where it started, at the beginning, with a figure in motion, walking into the unknown, going in circles around the street, around the sun, she who slides along her temporality without hiding the process, along the road that ribbons around infinity … —AK
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