However Many Times We Ran The Model The Results Were Pretty Much The Same is a new site-specific and collaborative artwork by Liam Gillick and Hito Steyerl in Roddino, North Italy. A brightly-coloured mural covers the exterior walls of a historic building, situated in an area overlooking the hills below. The installation’s high vantage point offers a position from which to observe its surrounding environs, reflecting on the history of how the land has been divided and worked upon.

Seemingly abstract, the work has an underlying complexity. Using publicly available data, the artists analysed the future of the surrounding area and potential changes in terms of economy, ecology and class. Using a simple simulation program that converted this information into the colour scheme underpinning the work, the results were, as the title suggests, “virtually the same” regardless of the data entered. The two things that completely ruined the pattern were extreme climate change and conflict. The grid pattern, meanwhile, reflects the way the surrounding landscape is perceived when seen from the village’s elevated position and suggests the economic partitioning (of land) that influenced the villagers’ society throughout the past centuries.

The historic building covered by the mural houses a newly established multifunctional space for the village's community, with a library, doctor's office and a new workshop and meeting place. The project reflects Gillick and Steyerl's shared interest in data, using landscape as a social portrait that is both abstract and rooted in the local context.

Project funded by the Interreg V-A  France-Italy ALCOTRA  Programme 2014-2020.