iFondazione PradaPorta Romana / Largo Isarco
Hito Steyerl: The Island
This exhibition has ended.
Site-specific project at Osservatorio: a new Hito Steyerl film and video installation on flooding, science fiction and quantum leaps through time.
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Partway through the film, Flash Gordon draws a glowing sword on his own AI-generated double, and the subtitles conclude that he "cannot fight slop with more slop". ArtReview spotted Bombardino Crocodilo, the Italian brain-rot meme, among the clips.
The show fills Osservatorio's two floors at the top of Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, level with the glass dome. You walk in past a glowing sphere showing a 3D scan of a Neolithic village off Korčula, Croatia, that has sat under 4.5 metres of water for 7,000 years, then follow blue tape on the floor to four screens of interviews. Upstairs, the 26-minute film plays to red armchairs on a platform shaped like that sunken island.
ArtReview read it as Steyerl turning back to "the power of aesthetic experience". Finestre sull'Arte liked it but found the logic tying its four storylines "not immediately intelligible". Osservatorio opens 2pm to 8pm on weekdays and 11am to 8pm at weekends, closed Tuesdays, last entry 7:30pm. The show closes on Friday 30 October.
Look for
The sunken-village sphere at the entrance
A luminous sphere shows a 3D scan of a heptagonal Neolithic settlement off Korčula, once linked by a narrow walkway and now 4.5 metres underwater.
The interview ring on level 1
Inside a molecule outline taped in glowing blue on the floor, four LED screens play interviews, including Darko Suvin recalling escaping into Flash Gordon during the 1941 bombing of Zagreb.
The Flash Gordon cinema on level 2
Red armchairs sit on a platform shaped like the sunken island, recalling the Zagreb cinema where Suvin first watched Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars.
Flash against his AI double
In the film, Flash Gordon fights his AI-generated copy with a glowing sword, and works out he cannot beat slop with more slop.
The klapa finale
The film ends with six singers of the Klapa Ivo Lozica, a traditional Dalmatian choir, performing on Korčula's quayside.
Good for
- Nerding Out
- Out-Of-Town Guests
Skip if
You want paintings or objects on walls: it's a 26-minute film and projections in blacked-out rooms.
Also at Fondazione Prada
On now nearby
Image credits
4
- Fondazione PradaSailko / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
- Pina Bausch, Le Sacre du printempsCourtesy of Museo Teatrale alla Scala
- Photo Grant Deloitte 2026Courtesy of Triennale Milano
- Piero Portaluppi: l'arte del disegnoCourtesy of Villa Necchi Campiglio