In 1831, a volcanic island surfaced between Sicily and Tunisia, acquired several names—Ferdinandea, Graham, Julia—and prompted competing territorial claims before disappearing beneath the sea. Elisa Giardina Papa takes this temporary landmass as the starting point for a history that cannot be fixed from a single shore.
At the ICA, the eighteen-minute single-channel video enters into dialogue with A Naked-Eye Blue: Cotisso, three masses of raw glass. Images, matter, and conflicting accounts operate as rival cartographies: the island never becomes a stable symbol, but a presence flickering between geological event, colonial archive, and the possibility of queer time.
Image: Elisa Giardina Papa, She Flickered In and Out of History, 2026, artwork still.