The Island

‘The Island’ is a site-specific project by filmmaker Hito Steyerl at Osservatorio in Milan, weaving together a new film, installation elements, and interviews to explore flooding as a metaphor for the rise of AI-driven authoritarianism, the climate crisis, and the politicization of science.

Drawing on quantum physics and science fiction, Steyerl collapses temporal and spatial boundaries, creating a series of narrative ‘leaps’ that move from microorganisms to galaxies, from the Neolithic to imagined futures. Inspired in part by an anecdote from critic Darko Suvin — who survived a 1941 bombing by imagining himself inside a Flash Gordon serial — the project reflects on how alternate worlds can emerge in moments of crisis.

Hito Steyerl provokes ‘a 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.’