Hyperfloods (and the Olympic Games): Hito Steyerl at Osservatorio Prada

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DATE

08 Apr 2026

AUTHOR

Orsola Vannocci Bonsi

Hyperfloods (and the Olympic Games): Hito Steyerl at Osservatorio Prada

AUTHOR

Orsola Vannocci Bonsi

Being in Milan and visiting The Island, by Hito Steyerl (1966, Munich), at Fondazione Prada Osservatorio during the first week of the Milano-Cortina 2026, precisely the day after the glittering and impeccably politically correct opening ceremony, felt like a comical coincidence, or rather like stepping into a continuous loop of images and a restless search for (or escape from) reality.

Steyerl’s exhibition, distributed over the two floors of the Osservatorio (with the first functioning almost as a long prelude to the film on the second), constructs a system of temporal worlds and realities that seem extremely distant yet deeply interconnected. The artist builds this environment through multiple narrative layers that act as pastiche devices: they structure the video installation on the first floor, the film upstairs, and the works scattered throughout the space. These narrations are very different from one another, but they share a common tension, pushing us to question what reality is today and where, and in which world, or dimension, it can be found.

The exhibition´s project originates from an anecdote told to Steyerl by science-fiction theorist Darko Suvin (1930, Zagreb). As a boy during World War II, he witnessed a bomb explosion in Zagreb, and to cope with the trauma, he mentally escaped into the adventures of Flash Gordon, imagining himself traveling with him to Mars. From that experience emerged his interest in science fiction as a tool of “cognitive estrangement”: the ability to create alternative worlds to make sense of the real one. Croatia then reappears in another narrative thread: the story of a Neolithic, human-made, artificial island discovered off the coast of the Dalmatian island of Korčula, built thousands of years ago and now submerged under about four meters of water. It is a real story, yet so symbolic it feels almost prophetic: a human settlement swallowed by the sea.

Another layer focuses on Nobel Prize–winning scientist Osamu Shimomura (1928, Kyoto - 2018, Nagasaki), like Suvin, a survivor of a Second World War explosion, the Nagasaki atomic bomb, and his discovery of the green fluorescent protein, extracted from jellyfish. This bioluminescent protein, a powerful scientific tool used today to study cells, pollution, and wave motions, reappears visually throughout the exhibition as glowing traces.

A further narrative thread involves the reflections of quantum physicist Tommaso Calarco, who compares the superposition of quantum states to a choral composition, like the traditional Dalmatian Klapa singing also present in the exhibition.

All these layers converge in the film on the second floor, set within a cinema-like environment which reminds the theater where Suvin first saw Flash Gordon’s adventures as a child. Here, a contemporary, parodic, deliberately grotesque version of the hero appears: a disoriented Flash Gordon, who travels to Korčula to “save the world,” questioning distracted and unconcerned tourists and confronting a machine-generated version of himself, while narrative flashes, AI-generated, continuously invade the screen. The film becomes a chaotic flow in which historical realities, scientific data, fiction, parody, and artificial imagery mix without hierarchy and the island appears alternately submerged, inhabited, or transformed into a tacky tourist destination. The effect is intentionally disorienting: it mirrors how we now scroll through information, constantly jumping between truth, fiction, propaganda, and synthetic content, what is often called AI slop, the visual and informational noise produced artificially, in many cases unconvincing and obviously fake, that paradoxically makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish what is real from what is not. In this context, the metaphor of flooding becomes multilayered: it refers simultaneously to the climate crisis, information overload, authoritarian drift, and cognitive disorientation. Steyerl attempts to respond to this confusion through speculative storytelling, bringing into dialogue the deep time, geological and planetary time, thus extremely slow and almost unnoticeable, and the hyper-fragmented junk time of contemporary digital capitalism.

And this is where the coincidence with the Milan Olympics became almost comical: leaving the exhibition and stepping back into the Olympic city felt like entering another bubble of reality, another island. The junk time of the global mega-event, which seems to have everything to do with it, except sports: endless lines, gadgets hunting, compulsive selfies, an almost automatic enthusiasm, a machine perfectly designed to produce images and consumption, with little that still feels genuinely human or athletic. A collective celebration that appears meaningful on the surface but is sustained by less visible tensions: environmental costs, accelerated urban transformations, and tightly controlled political narratives. A fast, shallow present dominated by the logic of the spectacle, almost another state superimposed onto the exhibition itself. Perhaps this is the most ironic and unsettling insight suggested by The Island: we no longer live in a single reality occasionally disrupted by fiction, but within a continuous field of parallel realities, some extremely slow and invisible, others hyper-visible and accelerated, in which it becomes increasingly difficult to navigate, and to understand which one is actually real.

The exhibition is on view at Osservatorio Prada until October 30, 2026.

BIOGRAPHY

Orsola Vannocci Bonsi is a cultural producer and advisor who has called Lisbon home for eight years. Through her work, she fosters connections through her research and the projects she helps bring to life. With experience as a sales director and gallery manager in various Portuguese art galleries, she was also project manager and artistic director of FEA Lisboa, founded the curatorial collective Da Luz Collective, and contributed to the programming of festivals in Italy and Portugal.

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