Introduction
Hito Steyerl’s site-specific exhibition project The Island immerses Osservatorio in a flow of multiple interwoven storylines united by the recurring motif of flooding, addressing urgent topics such as the rise of authoritarian tendencies driven by emerging technologies like AI, the climate crisis, and the growing political pressures on scientific research.
Artist, essayist, filmmaker, and lecturer, Steyerl has developed an experimental practice grounded in critical research into contemporary socio-political and cultural debates, tracing hidden connections among power, emerging technologies, Internet cultures, and global capitalism. With a distinctive mix of satire and critique, since the early 2010s Steyerl’s work is situated at the intersection of documentary film and experimental cinema, often extending these forms into the spatial and digital realms.
The exhibition unfolds over the two floors of the Osservatorio, featuring a new film created by the artist for this project, which takes shape as a video installation and articulates through installations, structures, and video interviews. Together they form a physical and conceptual landscape where the notion of time and space superimpose and interact, reorganized through the logic of quantum physics and science fiction.
The inspiration for The Island originates from an anecdote told some time ago to Hito Steyerl by literary critic and academic Darko R. Suvin (b. 1930, Zagreb, Croatia), author of the seminal book Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979). During a bomb attack in Zagreb in 1941, Suvin reacted to this shocking event by projecting himself into the American sci-fi serial film, Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938), where the comic book hero saves the Earth’s destiny. As explained by Steyerl, “This was the idea of science fiction, to create parallel worlds even under very adverse circumstances. Later, it occurred to me that we could implement this visually through quantum technology, as it deals with sudden jumps in states and the idea that several states can coexist simultaneously.”
The Island stages unexpected leaps across alternative spatial and temporal dimensions. References to quantum physics—superposition, entanglement, higher harmonics—serve to “bring together all the disparate realities” into a choral composition. Within this framework, science fiction functions as a register of invention that estranges viewers from habitual assumptions by fusing speculative narratives with scientific data. Echoing Hito Steyerl’s claim that “the opposite of truth is not fiction, but a lie,” the exhibition uses speculative narrative to investigate the concept of truth. Steyerl’s project unfolds into four interrelated narratives—“The Artificial Island,” “Lucciole,” “The Birth of Science Fiction,” and “Flash!”—and spans multiple scales, ranging from animal microorganisms to galaxies, from Neolithic ruins to imagined futures, from literary and cinematic narratives to popular cultures, from the pop visual language of comic books to the virality of AI-generated images.