E-STINA is a multimedia installation developed between July 2025 and February 2026 around time, superposition, and the coexistence of personal and political temporalities.
The work originated from the attempt to focus on a single summer day through the collection of casual fragments and recordings: phone videos of movements by car, screen captures from my computer while working on a 3D model of the moon, a poem found in a book, nutria along the riverbank, the evening wind, and the sound of Radio Alhara.
On that same day — 29 July 2025 — the cargo ship Cosco Pisces, blocked for days off the Ligurian coast by activists while transporting steel destined for Israel’s military industry, finally docked in the port of La Spezia without unloading its cargo. Those were the weeks in which port workers’ mobilizations between Livorno and Genoa were intensifying, eventually leading to the large blockades of the following autumn.
During that period I obsessively followed the movements of the ship through maritime tracking systems. Forced to remain in continuous motion while waiting offshore, the vessel traced unstable trajectories across the Mediterranean, producing involuntary drawings on the map. What had initially emerged as a simple temporal test gradually became the definitive material of the work: a fragmented portrait of a day in which intimate temporalities and wider geopolitical events unexpectedly converged.
The spatial structure of the installation developed directly from the trajectory of the ship itself. Temporal superimposition becomes spatial superimposition: videos, projections, sounds, and objects distribute themselves throughout the space retracing the unstable path of the vessel.
The installation developed slowly through the accumulation of natural and technological materials collected over time in my studio without a predefined function: roots gathered from the beach, stones from the mountains, fragments of glasses and a laser tube inherited from scientific equipment connected to previous research on quantum mechanics and time. These elements became supports for three projection surfaces, two semi-transparent and one mobile, together with projectors, speakers, electronic circuits, and kinetic mechanisms distributed throughout the space.
At the center of the installation, a bicycle fragment houses the electronic systems controlling the different actuators and speakers. Through them, Radio Alhara — recorded during the same days in which the Cosco Pisces circulated through the Mediterranean — emerges with the unstable sonic quality of a radio heard from a passing car or through an open window during a summer evening.
Alongside the video and sound components, the installation incorporates several kinetic mechanisms. A small fan reproduces the wind of 29 July, causing a lightweight tissue-paper screen to oscillate; a rotating diffraction filter decomposes the projector’s light into unstable spectral reflections over the moon model. Two green LED filaments traverse the installation, casting a diffuse glow reminiscent of the distant nocturnal lights of fishing boats visible from the coastline. Other movements remain purely mechanical, such as a freely rotating screen that shifts through the air displacement generated by visitors crossing the space.
The entire installation is configured so that it never fully repeats itself. The three video channels and audio tracks operate on different durations and continuously recombine through asynchronous loops, while the kinetic elements introduce further instability and variation. Light, sound, projections, and movement remain in constant drift, producing temporary alignments that cannot be reproduced identically twice.
Continuing a broader research developed across previous works around relational temporalities and layered cartographies, E-Stina approaches time not as a stable linear structure but as something emerging through material relations between bodies, infrastructures, technologies, landscapes, and historical events.
The title of the installation originates from a photograph taken in Prato in November 2025, where municipal workers had partially removed the graffiti FREE PALESTINA, leaving only the fragment “E-STINA” visible on the wall for an entire weekend before completing the erasure. This accidental trace, simultaneously disappearing and persisting, became an image for the temporal condition the work attempts to hold onto.
The installation was conceived following the invitation by Anna Rita Chiocca and Sandro Bottari at Studio Elisi, Livorno. Read the accompanying text by Anna Rita Chiocca.
