Georges Didi – Huberman, NINFA MODERNA, 2013

“It makes no sense to ask where Ninfa begins her run, nor where she will end it. For Aby Warburg Ninfa designates the impersonal hero of Nachleben, the ‘survival’ of those paradoxical things of the time, just existing, but indestructible, that come to us from afar and are incapable of dying completely. We cannot know where, or when, Ninfa will end, but how far she is able to nest, hide, transform. Many things happen to traditional nymphs and classic iconography shows them to us in all possible situations: lying or standing, waiting or running, languishing near a spring or sleeping in a cave, on a fountain or on a shell, spinning wool or singing inaudible melodies, twirling or chasing, attacking or participating in amorous games, kidnapped or kidnappers of young people, water donors and midwives of goddesses, nurses of Dionysus, custodians of the sources of life or fatal to humans. A wide range of cases, from which it is outlined a very slow movement – like a film shot for tens of centuries which we would like to accelerate in order to understand its logic -, a movement that does not cease to disturb: it is the unstoppable fall of the Nymph, her movement towards the ground, her ruining in slow motion. We want to know, then, how far the Nymph is capable of falling … “