Don’t Look Up
Cyanotype Print
2024-2026
In Don’t Look Up, Sirente continues her investigation into the psychological and cultural construction of catastrophe through a series of cyanotypes that juxtapose cinematic fiction with scientific imagery.
The work draws from iconic Hollywood scenes in which characters gaze toward the sky in awe, terror, anticipation or resignation. These moments—often preceding an alien invasion, meteor impact or other catastrophic event—capture the instant in which the unknown becomes visible, before action or resolution is possible. Removed from their original narratives, the figures become anonymous witnesses confronting something beyond their control.
Alongside these cinematic images, Sirente draws from NASA’s open-source image databases, using photographs and scientific imagery of asteroids, comets and meteorite craters as negatives for the cyanotypes. Real astronomical and geological traces are therefore placed in direct visual dialogue with Hollywood’s imagined catastrophes. The distinction between what has happened, what could happen and what has only been imagined begins to dissolve.
The cyanotype process further collapses these different registers. Scientific documentation, cinematic fiction and photographic interpretation are transformed into the same deep Prussian blue, becoming fragments of a shared visual mythology. The spectacular language of Hollywood is stripped of its narrative resolution, while the scientific images lose their purely documentary function.
Don’t Look Up ultimately explores the space between evidence and imagination: the moment when looking at the sky becomes an act of anticipation. The work asks how images teach us to imagine existential threats, and how fiction, science and collective memory can converge to make the unknown visible.