Notes on a "desert" island (2022-ongoing)

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Last update: April 2025

Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing)
Ongoing research project, multimedia installation, variable dimensions

Notes on a “desert” island (working title) is an ongoing speculative research project on the - almost - impossible imagery of a small island whose inhabitants have rejected contact with outsiders for centuries, thus making it an almost completely unknown - and unseen - place. While in the media this island is often presented through the superficial cliché of the “desert” island between the sublime and the savage, it becomes in my work a paradoxical case-study to reflect on the epistemological and power dynamics that are inherent to image-making, its ontology and contemporary stakes.
Over the past two years I have gathered a heterogeneous archive of the island’s attempted representations: from century-old maps to aerial imagery and Google Earth renderings, amateur Youtube videos from airplanes and institutional documentary campaigns. Making images of this island seems to be a mean to get hold of it - grasping it by encasing it in grids, frames, screens - at a distance. Such attempt is almost impossible, yet surprisingly recurrent. All of the island’s imagery showcase - equally yet in different ways - an abstract nature, seemingly raising from the gap between the unattainability of the subject and the materiality of its representations. This peculiar aspect becomes in my work the starting point to reflect on the materiality, fiction and agency of images, challenging their expected representational value by exposing their artifice. Here you can find the documentation of a recent installation set-up of the project. Through gestures of appropriation, un-making, and re-staging of the island’s existing imagery, articulating notions of transparency and opacity, visibility and invisibility - both on a political and semiotic level - I am reflecting on how it confronts mankind’s image-making obsession with its failure and, at large, addressing the deeply human desire to make sense of the world by making images of it. The - supposed - name of the island is never said, nor the island is ever actually shown in the works. Its imagery and information are always questioned and screened through deliberate choices of opacity and abstraction that transcend any documentary interest in favor of a larger critical reflection on the stakes of their very existence.

Name generator for a desert islandGenerative software, digital video animation, variable dimensions

Maps (1525-now) Custom-made lightbox, digital prints on acetate, variable dimensions

Self-portrait with the islandDigital video projection on semi-transparent surface

Flying over footage Digital video, color, sound, variable dimensions, loop

Threshold (Google Earth)
Digital print on photographic paper, variable dimensions

Arrow shooter Generative digital animation, color, sound, loop