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 as a game to test the distance that often arises between the multiple, entangled human and non-human agencies involved in an event, and how that event is later recorded or remembered, ultimately how its history is created.
The project was produced by the fictional “Resistance Dreamers” label and launched via Instagram.
It was made for the 4th annual gathering at the Ente di Decolonizzazione with the desire to put knowledge into practice.
The instruction shows the components of the game: the box, the envelope and myself.
One person, selected from the participants, was invited to read aloud the letter signed by a qualified independent archaeologist, coming from the future, requesting consent from the current visitors of Borgo Ex to share a vocal message.
With everyone’s consent, the audio was then played in English.
(an Italian version was also available).
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.
At the end of the game, the participants returned the data they had collected.
Below are some reflections written immediately after the end of the game.
A text with an analysis of what I understood will be released soon.
---
# June 2025
In the context of my research, it became necessary to understand the role of memory, how is it constructed, authorized, and circulated.
The game was conceived to investigate what kind of memories do we need to produce today for the future we want to inhabit.
At the same time, it was an occasion to interrogate my research process at the Borgo: what am I doing now that 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 we need to send, and in what format? 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? What kind of archive should we be moving toward?
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 things also frames ourselves—and the things that perhaps do not wish to be framed.
What kind of memory do we need to enable the life we desire? What is a memory at the end of the day? A document? A monument? Or something else?
This project challenges the limits of documentary memory and opens a space for experimentation with counter-narratives and critical reimaginings of how we relate to the past, the present, and the possible—questioning which practices are recognized as forms of memory, which are excluded, and for what reasons.
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 outcome of the many aspects of understanding I have been sharing over the years.
For me the most effective means of articulating a critique of a normalized, dominant mode of knowledge production—one potentially applicable to my own research—was to employ parody, foregrounding the material expressions of specific epistemic frameworks: the medicalized register (the flyer), the scientific–laboratory register (samples in Petri dishes and vials), and the museified/extractive/merchandising register (tote bag, stickers, museum ticket).
It worked to such an extent that the game also generated a hyperstition. The fictional stickers created for it closely resembled the pins actually produced for the inauguration of the association, revealing how futurability is conditioned by the production schemes we have inherited. It wasn’t clairvoyance—it was predictability.
How can we construct and inhabit a daily life that resists predictability and therefore capitalist subsumption?
# September 2025
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 the fictionalization process: 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 written 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 preservation, conservation, and materiality?
Wait a premise is needed!
Pasquinelli, in his 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 that inhabit social injustice, therefore 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" or hide the political urgency to re-discuss 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 is 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.