The solo exhibition by Alessandra Ferrini I Saw a Dark Cloud Rise proposes a meditation on the interconnections between imagination, technology and ideology. It emerges from the artist’s long-term research on the legacies of the colonial violence perpetrated during the Italian occupation of Libya. At the same time, it puts forward a series of open questions and lines of inquiry that form the basis of a new research on the genealogy of Fascist technological fantasies and their genocidal drive.

I Saw a Dark Cloud Rise unfolds over two rooms and revolves around a three-channel video installation by the same title. The project room hosts a reading room conceived by the artist as a “decompression space”, which allows for the materials employed in the video installation to be expanded, connected, and contextualised through a series of diagrams, reading materials and archival images.

In the second room, the work I Saw a Dark Cloud Rise investigates the interplay between technologies of vision and warfare, propaganda and historical imagery, in shaping how notions of progress and conflict are understood and deployed to affirm a collective imperialist agenda.

The exhibition focuses specifically, the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-12 that resulted in the Italian colonial occupation of Libya. This conflict marked the first use of aircraft and aerial bombing in military history and the development of new, martial uses of wireless technology. The war in Libya and the year 1911 – the 50th anniversary of Italian unification - are crucial to assess the way the Italian liberal nationalist ideology, built on the myth of Risorgimento, created the conditions for the emergence of Fascism. On the other hand, it brings to light the international, violent repercussions of this ideology, which led to the onset of World War I and the development of new genocidal technologies to control and annihilate colonial subjects.

By highlighting the impact of the Italo-Turkish War on the development of Futurism and Fascist ideology and aesthetics, the exhibition questions how technology has been mythologised, sacralised, and memorialised. Framing these considerations is a reflection on the ideological power of images. On the other hand, Ferrini proposes recalibrating this imaginal constellation to foster liberatory practices.

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I Saw a Dark Cloud Rise was prompted by the artist’s visit to the Sanctuary of Oropa, in the province of Biella (Italy). Dedicated to the Black Virgin of Oropa, it sits on a mountainside, overlooking a valley. Here, a commemorative plaque dedicated to Guglielmo Marconi and erected by the Fascist regime, claims that wireless technology had an almost divine origin: it came to Marconi as he contemplated the valley from this vantage point. In addition, the sanctuary presents a collection of ex-voto artefacts that include a painting referring to the 1911 massacre of Shar al-Shatt, perpetrated by the Italians on the Libyan population, which triggered the first aerial bombing.