Alice Bucknell | Clipped Horizon | Basement Roma

10 February — 3 April 2026

In In Free Fall (2011), Hito Steyerl suggests that we have lost horizontal perspective along with any shared ground. We’re living inside a collapse. No drama—just free fall. Here, falling does not necessarily mean falling apart but falling into place. Into a place with many more horizons, perhaps.

Alice Bucknell’s work follows the same logic, testing multiple perspectives—including the most uncomfortable ones—to keep the future open rather than having a single prediction. Moving through Bucknell’s work feels like entering a conspiratorial Reddit thread, where CTO Seth is selling you sunsets to cool the Earth, and Elon’s twin—Jason—trained on Donna Haraway’s theories and SpaceX press releases, promises high-quality artistic events on Mars. Pure chemistry and capital.

Bucknell’s solo exhibition title, Clipped Horizon, borrows from video game terminology, where “clipping” means a glitch in which collision logic breaks—bodies pass through walls, NPCs show up partially embedded—but the system keeps running. Welcome to the cosmic bug.

Similar to conspiracy forums, spending enough time in Bucknell’s simulations, you follow a dopamine-driven arc—from confusion to recognition—seeing meaningful connections in random data. Except the data here is not random at all: from interviews with space lawyers, NASA astronomers, drone pilots, to 3D scans of the city, merging archival images of the LA river with existing proposals for its redevelopment.

Narratives used to hold worlds together. Now they are the world. Bucknell’s contribution is to take that seriously—not by making sense of it, but by staying inside it long enough to notice it.

Basement Roma
Viale Mazzini 128, 00195 Rome
basementroma.org