黑料不打烊

For his first solo exhibition in Italy, Riar Rizaldi presents the first chapter of Fanfictie, a trilogy of video works that romanticizes colonial scientific activity in Indonesia between the 18th and 19th centuries. This new series explores how Western science sought to make sense of the world by observing the landscapes and populations of a tropical archipelago rich in volcanoes, restless ancestral spirits, a tempestuous ocean, and complex histories of migration between islands.

Fanfictie: Volcanology focuses on volcanology, introduced through the work of Dutch geologist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, and on how his theories clashed with local conceptions of volcanoes. In this video installation, Junghuhn appears as a symbol of colonial science, embodying the tension between different interpretations of reality and the radical and poetic potential that can emerge from encounters with alternative ways of conceiving the natural world. Through an exercise in speculative fiction, the video suggests that icons of nature can be swallowed and digested by both the human body and the earth itself.

The exhibition and new production are the outcome of a dialogue between Almanac and Rizaldi, which began in 2024 with a residency in Italy, between Stromboli and Turin where, in the archives of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, he came into contact with several Wayang puppet theatre artifacts of Javanese origin that directly inspired elements of the video installation.

Artist and filmmaker Riar Rizaldi (Indonesia, 1990) investigates systems of belief, with a particular focus on the Southeast Asian and Indonesian contexts. Experimenting with video and installation that merge speculative science fiction and documentary research, Rizaldi examines how technology and modern sciences interact with the social, political, and cultural lives of both human and non-human beings.