What “really” happened?
︎︎︎ 23-29 June 2025 / 4th annual Gathering
Borgo ex, Carlentini, Siracusa, Italy
What “really” happened? is a project that reflects on the gap between lived experience and official documentation.
It was conceived to test the distance that often arises between the multiple, entangled human and non-human agencies involved in an event, and the ways in which that event is later recorded or remembered, utlimately how its history is created.
The project was conceived as a game produced by the fictional producer “Resistance Dreamers”
and launched via instagram through this video:
Self-produced for the 4th annual gathering at the Ente di Decolonizzazione, the game instructions explain that it was driven by a desire to put knowledge into practice.
[picture of the instruction]
I, as the author of the game, along with the box and the envelope, were part of the game itself.
One person, selected from the participants, was invited to read the first letter aloud.
[image of the letter]
With everyone’s consent, the audio was then played in its English version (though the Italian version is also available below).
Once the box was opened and the devices were chosen, the participants independently decided to document their present. In parallel, each day a message and an object emerged from the box.
[pics]
Post reflection /
The game was conceived to ask the participants: what kind of memories do we need to produce today for the future we want to inhabit? And equally what am I producing now that I already know I might regret in the future?
If the future were to ask us to tell the story of our present, what kind of information would I need to send, and in what form? Would they be images? Sounds? Texts? Or do we need something else entirely?
Who has the interest, the commitment, the influence—or the power—to document what happens?
Committing to documentation implies an intentional act: a will to leave a trace.
Is everybody feeling entitled to do it?
From the construction of images and the media engaged, to the language used in a text, down to the materials and formats we choose—everything should be carefully considered to avoid reproducing dominant visual and epistemic regimes. Therefore, it is essential to acknowledge that the way we frame also frames ourselves—and the things that perhaps do not wish to be framed.
What kind of memory do we need to enable change?
What kind of archive should we be moving toward?
This is a project that challenges the limits of documentary memory and opens a space for experimentations in counter-narratives, and critical reimaginings of how we relate to the past, the present, and the possible.
This game was also a journey into the way I approach my research on the borgo—how I produce it and for whom. Each object that materialised in the box represented the most unsettling, yet possible, extractive-colonial interpretation of the many layers I have been sharing regarding my research investigation: in medicalised form (the flyer), scientific-laboratory form (samples in Petri dishes and vials), and museified/extractive/merchandising form (tote bag, stickers, museum ticket).
Also, the game generated a kind of hyperstition: the fictional stickers made for it closely resembled the pins actually produced for the inauguration of the association… This isn’t clairvoyance—it’s predictability.
How do we avoid being predictable? How can we construct and inhabit a daily life that resists predictability therefore subsumption?
Post-post reflection:
A research ally asked me why this game is centered on AI—why frame the entire discourse around artificial intelligence if it’s not even my field of research?
Instinctively, I replied that it was useful for fictionalization: when imagining a future grounded in the present, AI will likely become the primary basis for knowledge production.
Later, upon further reflection, I recalled a compelling article by Matteo Pasquinelli. In hindsight, fragments of his thinking on algorithms clearly resonated within the game's logic. As Pasquinelli argues, the algorithm is not a contemporary invention, but a derivation of pre-existing social forms of automation.
One might ask: what does the algorithm have to do with restoration, conservation, and materiality?
Pasquinelli, in this article published in Jacobin, explains that the origins of deep learning can be traced back to the “Perceptron” the first neural network. This system automated "statistical tools of multimedia analysis" borrowed from psychometrics—a discipline that quantified intelligence through averages drawn from populations, inevitably reinforcing pre-existing social disparities around class, race, and gender.
Artificial intelligence is thus an accelerated, expanded, and centralized continuation of this historical accumulation of power—a tool for controlling populations—whose epistemological framework remains invisible. This invisibility allows for distraction about how these machines "think" or "reflect." instead of negotiating politically how the algorithm works, performs and impacts.
Returning to the automation embedded in conservation practices: epistemological frameworks are not transparent and the institutional systems through which they are reproduced often suppress critique, stifle the questioning of values, and block political re-orientation. This because preservation is not completely about safeguarding buildings per se, but functions more as a strategy of institutional preservation of a specific system of values.