Hito Steyerl’s The Island, currently at Fondazione Prada’s Osservatorio in Milan until 30 October 2026, refuses to stay inside one period of history.
The project combines a newly produced film with installation, objects and video interviews. Its stories move from microorganisms and Neolithic time to war, contemporary technology and imagined futures. Flooding keeps returning as a connecting image.
Steyerl describes two very different experiences of time.
One is the frantic time produced by technology and capitalism: updates, interruptions, loops and information constantly replacing information.
The other is deep time.
Geological time.
Underwater time.
Time that barely notices whether a smartphone generation lasts three or five years.
I like the collision because moving image normally controls time extremely well.
Twenty-four frames.
Cut.
Jump.
Repeat.
Speed up.
Slow down.
But Steyerl uses those tools to point toward scales of time the video itself cannot really contain.
A five-minute sequence can jump thousands of years.
The screen makes that transition instantaneous.
Reality cannot.
Perhaps that is one reason moving image is so effective for thinking about our current technological culture.
The edit has taught us to expect reality to move at the speed of an edit.
The planet never agreed.
https://www.fondazioneprada.org/project/the-island-hito-steyerl/?lang=en
