Elisa Giardina Papa, She Flickered In and Out of History, 2026. Single-channel video, colour, 5.1-channel sound; 18 min. Installation view at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2026. Photograph © Rob Harris.
Elisa Giardina Papa, A Naked-Eye Blue: Cotisso [detail], 2026. Installation of three masses of cotisso; dimensions variable. Installation view at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2026. Photograph © Rob Harris.
Elisa Giardina Papa, A Naked-Eye Blue: Linguacce, 2026. Hand-shaped glass, sandblasted inscription. Installation view at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2026. Photograph © Rob Harris.
September 2026
A cruising spot. A rave, a riot. A stock market’s black swan. A wildcat strike. Elisa Giardina Papa’s new video work She Flickered In and Out of History (2026) opens by listing a series of events and sites which can be collectively defined by their refusal to become proper. They are, after José Esteban Muñoz, “ecstatic” moments where the heteronormative-capitalist machinery of surveillance and control encounters what exceeds it, and falters (Muñoz 32). A cruising spot: an allusive, often nocturnal geography constituted by temporary queer relations that stage forms of intimacy irreducible to straight time. The financial black swan names, similarly, an event that escapes probabilistic reason, exposing the contingency of systems that present themselves as inevitable. Across radically different registers, these are practices and events that refuse capture: flickering into view only to recede again from the temporal, spatial and epistemic conditions from which they emerge, leaving in their wake the trace of alternative socio-political possibilities.
Presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, alongside a new glass installation, Giardina Papa’s eighteen-minute video work takes as its subject a similarly fugitive site: an island that emerged between Sicily and Tunisia in 1831, sparked a violent sovereignty dispute, and disappeared back beneath the ocean’s surface a mere six months later. It is a story widely known in the Sicilian regions, kept alive through oral retelling rather than settled historical record. She Flickered In and Out of History forms part of a trilogy of video works, following U Scantu: A Disorderly Tale (2022), which explores the Sicilian myth of the donne di fora, whose ambiguity when it came to gender, nature and morality made them subject to persecution by the Spanish inquisition. The new work continues Giardina Papa’s ongoing investigation into forms of knowledge and desire that have been lost, suppressed or neglected.
Presented on a large, free-standing LED screen, the video work unfolds in three chapters. The first, ‘After Homer and Before the Bomb King’, narrates the island’s volcanic emergence in the summer of 1831. Its title stages a tension between three temporal registers: mythological, geological and political. ‘After Homer’ situates the island within a Mediterranean genealogy that precedes modern cartography. Like Odysseus learns in The Odyssey, islands are, and always have been, unruly places that trouble that fantasy of human control and knowledge. The reference to the Greek poet also comes, the artist notes, by way of a rereading of Gilles Deleuze’s 1953 essay Desert Islands, in which he writes that islands are “either from before or after humankind” (Deleuze 9): formations that belong to a geological deep time that both precedes and exceeds human history.
Deleuze distinguishes between two different kinds of islands: Continental and Oceanic. Continental islands are “accidental”, separated from an existing landmass through erosion or fracture, while Oceanic islands are “originary, essential islands” produced through underwater eruptions, “bringing to the light of day a movement from the lowest depths” (Deleuze 9). For Deleuze, islands, especially volcanic formations, pose a problem for human thought because they cannot be easily understood as the stable, delimited territories that colonial imaginaries require for their projects. Humans, he suggests, need to imagine the island as already deserted, contained and settled as though the “active struggle between earth and water” had ended, or could at least be brought under control (Deleuze 9). Yet the island also carries the promise of a beginning: a site from which something might emerge anew. In this sense, islands always already expose the contingency of territorial boundaries and the futility of attempts to arrest the forces that produce and undo them, while revealing the desire for mastery that underlies projects of imperial possession.
The geological and mythological durations invoked by Homer give way to the explicitly political temporality of ‘The Bomb King’: Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, known locally as Re Bomba (Giardina Papa, She Flickered 7). When the island erupted, Ferdinand staked an early claim to the island, naming it after himself in a gesture characteristic of the fantasy that the island could be immediately converted into territory; its geological becoming enclosed and stabilised within the juridical and symbolic structures of sovereignty. Years later, Ferdinand would order a bombardment of Messina, killing his own civilians, an act that would lead to the Sicilian Revolution, an event which is considered to be “the opening act of the Springtime of the Peoples, the revolutionary wave that spread across Europe against absolute monarchies” in 1848-49 (Giardina Papa, She Flickered 7).
By bringing these temporal registers together – mythological, geological and political – Giardina Papa suggests that the island itself is a temporal problem: a break in the smooth continuity of historical process. It belongs simultaneously to a geological duration indifferent to humanity, to a mythological past that exceeds the epistemic structures of modernity, and to a revolutionary horizon in which the established order was, however briefly, ruptured in the West.
Through extensive archival research, Giardina Papa wrote a script that she handed over to the poet Megan Fernandes before translating it back into her native Sicilian. Narrated in the collective first-person plural, the island never coheres into a singular entity. “It was night. We shot up above the water, shapeshifted our rock into circles, peaks of foam, a stealth shoulder”, the voice recounts, before describing itself as a “preposition”: neither subject nor object, but a joint, a relation. Plunged beneath the ocean’s surface, where the island still exists eight metres underwater, the viewer occupies a more-than-human perspective. Volcanic globules momentarily cohere; clouds of black sand billow through the water; bubbles of sulphate gas fizz towards the surface. Agency is dispersed across an unstable ecology that is “always on the verge of emergence and disappearance”, always already new, always already gone (Giardina Papa, She Flickered 3).
The island’s eruption in 1831 alerted the keen noses of Britian, France, and Spain, among others, each reading in it a potential strategic trading position at the centre of the Mediterranean. Against the pulsing, anxious beat of duendita’s score, dogs – Cirneco dell’Etna, an ancient Sicilian hunting breed native to Mount Etna – are filmed from below, their soft undersides exposed as they criss-cross the screen, pausing occasionally to sniff the ground. Once again taking up the island’s perspective, Giardina Papa narrates the absurdity of the colonial scramble: “A Frenchman called us Julia. Others came with flags, oars, and maps”. But the island refused to stabilise, refused to be measured. When, as the artist puts it, the language of measurement began to fail, cruder and more intimate forms of observation took its place: the colonial powers “smelled the island. They tasted its waters” (Giardina Papa, She Flickered 4). Scientific description slipping into something more “bodily and sensory”, as if ingestion were the ultimate form of territorial possession, as if the island might be known, and therefore owned, by being consumed (Giardina Papa, She Flickered 4).
Six months later, the island disappeared back beneath the sea. In She Flickered In and Out of History Giardina Papa does not attempt to recover the island as a historical object. During her research for the exhibition, the artist dived down with her camera to where the island remains submerged eight metres below. But the island, nor humans for that matter, never appear in the work. Pointing to the influence of her colleague Ariella Azoulay, whose work interrogates the violence of forcing everything into visibility – a demand that only enables capture, control, and ultimately consumption – Giardina Papa decided not to show the island. In refusing to put it on display, the artist allows its refusal to become material.
Instead, the artist points to ways of witnessing without closure. Several cotisso sculptures – an unstable form of Murano glass traditionally destined for remelting – sit on black rubber plinths around the video work, which visitors are invited to sit alongside. Like the island, they are ungovernable, continuing to crack and disintegrate throughout the exhibition, with perhaps a hint of danger to the viewer’s own bodily integrity as sharp shards fall away. The hulks of glass are a deep shade of blue, reflecting the colour of the sun observers widely reported seeing during the island’s eruption in 1831. Scientists later attributed the phenomenon to volcanic particles and sulphur aerosols released into the atmosphere by the eruption. During the video work, the litany of tonal hues people described seeing are listed off: “violet, lilac, purple, indigo blue; three times”. What becomes clear is how even language fails to grasp at multiplicity, how it too exacts its own form of violence: an attempt to name the world can never fully contain it. The ancient Greeks, Giardina Papa reminds us, had no word for blue.
And yet language can also be a tool of refusal. Across the walls of the ICA’s Lower Gallery, holes have been carved out to accommodate several vivid blue glass tongues inscribed with sections of the video work’s poem in Sicilian. [1] The language, as the artist notes, is an “undercommon” language, not widely shared among Italians and markedly different from it (Giardina Papa, She Flickered 5). The glass tongues are titled Linguaccie, the Italian word for sticking one’s tongue out mockingly, a gesture of refusal. Inscribed with fragments of the poem, they suggest how the story remains on the tongues of Sicilians, shared and reshared orally about the time the coloniser was thwarted, embarrassed. As the artist notes, “in oral culture, a story can always be retold…every retelling can activate the emancipatory possibility most needed at that moment” (Giardina Papa, She Flickered 5).
In the final chapter of the video work, a “provisional slippage” between elemental and political antagonism emerges (Giardina Papa, She Flickered 8). The narrator recalls moments when other ‘we’s appeared and threatened, however briefly, the prevailing order: the Stonewall riots in 1969, the Tunisian Revolution in 2010, the Algerian War of Independence in 1954, Ni Una Menos in 2015, among others. “Moments of anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, and anti-heteronormative opposition” (Giardina Papa, She Flickered 8), events that interrupted the continuity of historical time. This is where the work’s temporal logic becomes political. The “we” accumulates across these political moments, becoming dense with the force of the moment itself: a becoming that never forecloses, that exists outside of conventional time. Here the work returns to Muñoz’s notion of the “ecstatic” as a way of experiencing time in which past, present, and future overlap, allowing people to feel and enact a different world in the here and now (Muñoz 32).
But what is also clear is that, in these moments, something happens without a plan: there is a no. Beyond the work’s questioning of colonial border-making and imperialist gain, and its refusal of the demand for visibility, the exhibition’s power lies for me in its proposition of political refusal as more than an alternative to resistance. Resistance operates within structures of political legibility: it makes demands upon existing institutions, seeking recognition in terms those institutions can understand. Refusal begins elsewhere. It does not necessarily seek recognition; instead, it refuses the terms through which recognition is offered. This distinction is crucial to the work’s understanding of the “we”. Refusal allows a collective to appear before it has been recognised as a political subject, while withholding that recognition as an endpoint. A space opens where there was supposedly none. A demand emerges that the existing grammar cannot accommodate. A gathering becomes temporarily ungovernable: not fully designated, not fully policed, not reducible to its individual bodies. The “we” of the final chapter is, like the island’s “we”, grammatical before it is political: a relation looking for a subject.
To refuse is not simply to say no. It is a commitment to remaining otherwise: refusing the demand that a narrative make itself available to be consumed, instrumentalised, or used against us. It is a flicker that jolts the historical present, briefly throwing its apparent continuity out of shape and leaving us dumbfounded. As the “we” that forms dissipates, it leaves behind a pleasant aftertaste: the bittersweet possibility of the otherwise, lingering in the minds and mouths of those of the undercommons. Spoken in circles, animated once again when the present demands – as it always does – a remedy, a soothing tongue understood only by those on the outside. To refuse capture is not necessarily to disappear. It may instead be to remain otherwise, where another history – and another political possibility – can flicker into view.
[1] Although the tongues are made from vetro massello, a different material from the naturally unstable cotisso, Giardina Papa notes that she nevertheless had to remake them twice because they cracked during the stabilisation process.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974. Edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Michael Taormina, Semiotext(e), 2004.
Giardina Papa, Elisa. She Flickered In and Out of History, 2026.
Giardina Papa, Elisa. “Q&A with Elisa Giardina Papa.” Interview by Andrea Nitsche-Krupp. She Flickered In and Out of History, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2026, www.ica.art/media/13674.pdf.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press, 2009.