HITO STEYERL
“The Island” is a site-specific project by artist Hito Steyerl presented at Osservatorio in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan.
With “The Island,” Hito Steyerl delves into multiple narratives united by the recurring element of flooding, evoking urgent topics such as current authoritarian tendencies fostered by the use of AI, the climate crisis, and political pressures on science. The exhibition features a new film created by Steyerl specifically for this project, which converge into a video installation and give rise to a series of sculptures, structures, and video interviews. Through these works, time and space are reorganized by borrowing the logic of quantum physics and science fiction to explore their aesthetic and visual dimensions.
The practice of Hito Steyerl (b. 1966, Munich, Germany) combines artistic production with theoretical analysis to investigate complex socio-political and cultural issues such as the power of media, the ambivalence of technology and science, and the global circulation of images. Developed from research and interviews, Steyerl’s works are situated at the intersection of documentary film and experimental cinema, often extending these forms into the spatial and digital dimensions.
The original idea for “The Island” comes from an anecdote told some years ago to Hito Steyerl by literary critic and academic Darko Suvin (b. 1930, Zagreb, Croatia), author of the seminal 1979 book Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. During a bomb attack in Zagreb in 1941, Suvin reacted to this terrifying event by projecting himself into the American sci-fi serial film, Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938), where the comic book hero saved the Earth’s destiny.
As explained by Steyerl, “This is when Suvin realized that in any situation other worlds were possible. This was the idea of science fiction to create parallel worlds even under very adverse circumstances. So, I was super fascinated by that inventiveness that comes up with science fiction studies out of this very urgent situation. Then later it occurred to me that we could have visually implemented this idea through quantum technology, because it deals with sudden jumps in states, and also with the idea that several states can coexist at the same time.”
In “The Island”, the viewer witnesses continuous leaps between different and alternative spatial and temporal dimensions. In this context, science fiction is considered a factual account of fictions that can estrange us from our usual assumptions about reality and is employed as a tool to combine contradictory or opposite worlds, blending fiction with scientific data.
The exhibition unfolds into four interrelated narratives — “Lucciole,” “The Artificial Island,” “The Birth of Science Fiction,” and “Flash!” — and it is paced by the dimensional leaps peculiar to science fiction and quantum physics: from microorganisms of animals and plants to galaxies, from the Neolithic to the future, from the exhibition to filmic space, from literary and poetic narrative to popular culture, from the kitsch aesthetic of comic books to current AI slop. “The Island” suggests a time beyond human comprehension, spanning from the Neolithic era to World War II, with time-space jumps to the biographical tales of Shimomura and Suvin. With her film and exhibition project, Hito Steyerl intentionally provokes a productive clash between two different notions of time: the junk time of technology and capitalism that disrupts time with continuous jumps and loops that interrupt and exhaust us, and the deep time—not human time, Neolithic time, underwater time—times that are outside of the human artificially created spectrum.
In “The Island”, the viewer witnesses continuous leaps between different and alternative spatial and temporal dimensions. In this context, science fiction is considered a factual account of fictions that can estrange us from our usual assumptions about reality and is employed as a tool to combine contradictory or opposite worlds, blending fiction with scientific data. “The Island” unfolds into four interrelated narratives —“Lucciole,” “The Artificial Island,”“The Birth of Science Fiction,” and “Flash!”— and it is paced by the dimensional leaps peculiar to science fiction and quantum physics: from microorganisms of animals and plants to galaxies, from the Neolithic to the future, from the exhibition to filmic space, from literary and poetic narrative to popular culture, from the kitsch aesthetic of comic books to current
AI slop. “Lucciole” introduces the visual and symbolic presence of bioluminescent plankton as a
detector of wave motion. At the centre of this chapter is the organic molecule Luciferin,
successfully studied by Japanese scientist Osamu Shimomura (1928–2018), who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008, along with Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien, for the discovery and development of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP). In the 1960s, he isolated GFP from jellyfish and discovered that the protein glowed green when illuminated with ultraviolet light. GFP, which emits a shimmering light, has become an essential marker in science and medicine for studying biological processes within cells.
“The Artificial Island” retraces the recent discovery in Dalmatia of a submerged artificialisland dat ing back to the Neolithic period. In 2021, archaeologist Mate Parica from the University of Zadar in Croatia discovered that the 7000-year-old site off the coast of Korčula, now located 4 to 5 meters beneath the Adriatic Sea, was originally connected to the island by an ancient road, before the water level rose substantially due to climate change. The exhibition opens on the first floor of the Osservatorio with a heptagonal sculpture featuring a fictional excavation situation: a lamp, a sword, and Darko Suvin’s book
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. It functions as a preface to the project’s core narratives. The heptagon refers to the shape of the submerged island. A large, spherical installation, which displays 3D views of this archaeological excavation site, is partially embedded in a heptagonal base, as if it were situated just above sea level. “The Birth of Science Fiction” explores the intellectual legacy of Darko Suvin’s
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, a milestone in the literary and theoretical criticism of
science fiction. His definition of this genre as “the literature of cognitive estrangement” was
at the center of a critical debate that spanned decades, transcending literature to approach
science fiction with a political and philosophical perspective.
“Flash!” evokes Suvin’s childhood fantasies and intuitions when he was a passionate reader
of Flash Gordon comics. Under bombing in Zagreb during World War II, he imagined himself
transported to Mars like his hero in the movie serial he saw on the big screen a few years
earlier. The paradoxical coexistence of two realities so distant from each other, one
dramatically real and the other imagined or utopian, experienced in this revelatory moment of
his life, is the basis of how science fiction works.
An installation consisting of four LED screens and a hexagonal seat projects images of submerged landscapes and video interviews filmed during the making of the film with Quantum physicist Tommaso Calarco, archaeologist Mate Parica, language historian Sachi Shimomura, the daughter of the Nobel Prize-winning chemist, and author Darko Suvin. The second floor of the Osservatorio features an environment reminiscent of the movie theater where Suvin saw Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars in the early 1940s. The classic red armchairs are placed on a platform that refers to the shape of the artificial island. The big
screen displays Hito Steyerl’s film, which initiates the entire exhibition project, and entangles
the different strands with one another using advanced traditional choir (Klapa) singing from
local Klapa Ivo Lozica. Three sculptures, composed of driftwood and supporting hemispheres with projections of 3D scans of Neolithic artifacts animated by quantum effects, conclude the exhibition path.
“The Island” suggests a time beyond human comprehension, spanning from the Neolithic era to World War II, with time-space jumps to the biographical tales of Shimomura and Suvin. With her film and exhibition project, Hito Steyerl intentionally provokes a productive clash between two different notions of time: the junk time of technology and capitalism that disrupts time with continuous jumps and loops that interrupt and exhaust us, and the deep time—not human time, Neolithic time, underwater time—times that are outside of the human artificially created spectrum. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated publication in the Quaderni series, published by Fondazione Prada. It includes three conversations between Hito Steyerl and curator Niccolò Gravina, physicist Tommaso Calarco, and scholar Sachi Shimomura, daughter of Osamu Shimomura.