Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents I Saw a Dark Cloud Rise, a solo exhibition by Alessandra Ferrini that offers a reflection on the interconnections between imagination, technology, and ideology. The work stems from the artist's extensive research on the legacy of colonial violence perpetrated during the Italian occupation of Libya. At the same time, it poses a series of open questions and lines of inquiry that form the basis for a new investigation into the genealogy of fascist technological fantasies and their genocidal drive.

I Saw a Dark Cloud Rise unfolds in two rooms and revolves around the eponymous three-channel video installation, commissioned and produced by the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. The first room, a reading room conceived by the artist as a "decompression space," allows for the expansion, connection, and contextualization of the materials used in the video installation through a series of diagrams and texts. In the second room, the work I Saw a Dark Cloud Rise explores the interaction between imagination, technologies of vision and war, propaganda, and historical iconography, analyzing how notions of progress and conflict are understood and utilized to assert an imperialist collective agenda and imagery. The work invites reflection on the centrality of coloniality in Western practices of vision and visualization, as well as in the formation of collective desires and aspirations.

The exhibition focuses on the often overlooked years preceding the First World War, particularly on the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-1912, which led to the Italian colonial occupation of Libya. This conflict marked the introduction of the airplane and aerial bombing into military history, as well as the development of new war uses of wireless technologies. The war in Libya and the year 1911 - the fiftieth anniversary of the Unification of Italy - are crucial for understanding how the Italian liberal nationalist ideology, built on the myth of the Risorgimento, created the conditions for the emergence of Fascism. At the same time, the exhibition highlights the violent international repercussions of this ideology, which contributed to the outbreak of the First World War and the development of new genocidal technologies to control and annihilate colonial subjects.