Upon entering the first level of the Fondazione Prada Osservatorio in Milan, one is left wondering whether to proceed or not. The exhibition space, normally flooded with light from the glass windows, is almost completely dark, with bands of light on the floor forming angular geometric patterns, indicating winding possible routes to follow so as not to get lost, as if there were a sudden blackout.
This is the entrance to The Island, Hito Steyerl’s site-specific project.
The entire installation unfolds in a darkness akin to the seabed into which one is submerged. Looking back, before entering the darkness, one notices right at the entrance, faintly lit by a lightbulb, a shelf made of two wooden logs — like those found on the beach — supporting a book with a poem beside it.
The latter, together with the book The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), are the work of the ninety-year-old Croatian writer Darko Suvin. They constitute the thread, or rather the strand which, together with the two logs washed up by the sea, weaves through the interconnections between heterogeneous spatiotemporal elements that Hito Steyerl has arranged within the space: science fiction literature, the island of Curzola and the bioluminescence of jellyfish, the Neolithic era and the Second World War, the atomic bomb and the adventures of Flash Gordon, artificial intelligence and fake videos on TikTok.
Listed in this way, they would all appear to be facts and objects with no interrelation whatsoever. Yet the artist’s narrative connects them like atoms in molecular compounds — or better still, as the artist herself argues, like quantum objects, interrelated regardless of the space-time distance separating them.
The thread linking Darko Suvin to the island of Curzola, in Croatia, is the history of the last century: the writer was imprisoned there during the Italian occupation between 1941 and 1943, and it was precisely at that juncture that he saw the film Flash Gordon Conquers Mars.
Here, history intertwines with geography, ecology and prehistory. In fact, just a few hundred metres from the island of Korčula itself, archaeologist Mate Parica, using satellite surveys and drones, recently discovered the existence of an artificial heptagonal island, likely built 7,000 years ago and subsequently submerged by rising post-glacial waters.
This and other stories linked to various disciplines capture the imagination and thoughts of visitors in an interactive experience involving movement and stops within the installation, all marked out by luminescent heptagonal walkways.
A luminous spherical installation uses 3D reconstructions to illustrate the discovery of the artificial island. Not far away, within a spherical dome, the luminescence of jellyfish emerges like fireflies; it was through these that the Japanese physicist Shimomura — who as a boy survived the Nagasaki bomb — discovered Green Fluorescent Protein, a luminescent biomedical marker. Perhaps it is also a reference to Pasolini’s ‘disappeared fireflies’?
The exhibition culminates in a video installation with four vertical screens, like giant mobile phones. The screens feature interviews with four figures whose stories intertwine across space and time: the quantum physicist Tommaso Calarco, the archaeologist Mate Parica — followed by the chants of the choir from the island of Curzola — the language historian Sachi Shimomura, daughter of the aforementioned chemist, and finally the author Darko R. Suvin.
The interviews form the narrative thread through which the visitor can discover meaning in the underwater labyrinth constructed by the artist. But what makes this work aesthetically compelling does not lie in a logical, intellectual, didactic explanation of the connections between distant facts, places and times.
Rather, it is a sudden perception of meaning, a harmony between different factors that becomes apparent as one lingers at the ‘stations’ scattered throughout the space, each with its own intonation, just as with the different vocal timbres and tones of a choir’s voices that converge, interrelated, into a harmony of listening, aptly cited by the artist. And this perception occurs not without surprise: the meaning of what lies before us becomes clear, as Wittgenstein would say, all of a sudden. “The fog lifts”, the vision becomes clear, the sudden flash of perception appears both as lived experience and as thought. The signs link together, despite their differences.
The exploration of the darkness of the seabed in the foreground reassembles itself — and breaks apart again — in the background, where the gaze is literally assaulted by a dazzling video. In a sort of mini-cinema, we witness the screening of a video in bright, hyper-pop colours: on the big screen, the current reality of the island of Curzola, with its tourists, serves as the stage for a performance by a hypothetical, trashy new Flash Gordon – Mark Waschke – who engages with them like a street barker.
In real time, TikTok videos, animated Flash Gordon comics and Brainrot animations produced by AI intermingle — with the same unsettling leaps in time and space that scroll across social media. Here, the sensory overload, normally confined to the few centimetres of a mobile phone screen, is magnified, occupying the entire field of vision, exploding in its perceptual violence that erases individual space and time within a fictitious sociality. One feels the urge to return to the depths of the sea and search once more, underwater, alongside the poets, for the vanished fireflies.
Hito Steyerl. The Island, Osservatorio Fondazione Prada, Milan, 04.12.2025 – 30.10.2026
images: (cover 1-4-6) Hito Steyerl. still from: «The Island», 2025. Single channel HD video, Cinema; Quantum noise holograms; Archaeological projection spheres; Documentary videos. Duration 26 minutes (Single channel HD video); installation dimensions variable. Image CC 4.0. Courtesy of the artist, Fondazione Prada, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul (2-3-5) Exhibition view of «The Island» by Hito Steyerl. Osservatorio Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy: Fondazione Prada
