Searching for Gradiva's Step (2025)
In-between roman era bas-relief, early 20th century novel (Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva: a Pompeian Fantasy), significant reference in the establishment of psychoanalysis (Freud, Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva), and post structuralist pivot motif of 'archive fever' (Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression), Gradiva's step is a liminal figure that stands for the (unconscious) coagulation of presence and trace, but also for the projected moment outside time in which the present of tracing and the referentiality of the trace are one and the same.
If embodied being, phenomenologically experienced as presence, leaves traces, and following traces one strives to uncover presence, Gradiva's step figuratively points towards the absurd yet necessary limit of this logic: living the Other's present, dying the Other's death. The impossibility of this absurd limit opens the (an)archival vacillation between passionately following the trace towards a promised presence and destroying the trace in the attempt to overcome the inherent deferral and differentiation of the present that it implies. What one unavoidably experiences in the always already failed search for Gradiva's step is the infinite re-mediation of presence, the fact that in a feedback loop of sorts the presence that generates the trace is present only retrospectively on the ground of the trace that itself generates.
The title, 'Searching for Gradiva's Step', does not describe the content of the audio-video essay, it rather offers a reading key. I am not interested in the transmission of a predetermined sense, but in the creation of a sensorial context (audio-visual, but also haptic) that affords the proliferation of potential senses in the intertwinement between microscopic images that frustrate straight forward recognition, abstract generated imagery (produced with the help of the open access video synthesizer Hydra: https://hydra.ojack.xyz/) and a soundscape that permeates the visual interplay, further destabilizing it and opening a space of unfamiliarity. The work invites the audience to get lost among disorienting digital and analog traces—to attach some ill-fitting labels to the unfamiliar imagery: dust, soap bubbles, printed text, menstrual tissue. Slight hesitations that point to the hand behind the camera, repetitions, and glitches (audio and video) offer the seeds of divergent senses in the impossible search for presence, inherently intertwined with absurd, dissonant traces.
Sound
The work proposes a disorienting interplay of repetition and difference that constructs and deconstructs sensorial associations between the soundscape and the visual imagery, experimenting with the effects that the soundscape has over visual perception and vice-versa.
The basic components of the soundtrack are obtained through generative methods (as with the video imagery, I am eager to explore tools that are open access, in the case of sound I have used VCV Rack), and then further edited and modified to fit in a puzzle-like structure with the video fragments. The main idea was to search, in an embodied affective mode, for possible points of connection between algorithmically generated (or algorithmically modified) abstract sound and video fragments. Some times the sounds and the video images reinforce each-other, other times they are contradictory, instantiating a general sense of ambiguity and unfamiliarity. The resulting audio-visual structure, in its absurdity (dissonance), invites the spectators in their turn to use their affectivity and imagination to fill in the puzzle.
Searching for Gradiva's Step was screened in the official competition at the Punto y Raya Festival 2025: https://www.puntoyrayafestival.com/fest/editions