“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.
