For one year, Italian artist and filmmaker Maria Luisa Usai accompanied Benedikt Hartl, recipient of the Villa Massimo Rome Prize 2024/25, during his residency at the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo. Out of the observation of this real year emerged a film in which documentary and fiction become increasingly indistinguishable.

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L’ultimo borsista begins where something has already come to an end. The gates of Villa Massimo open. A man in a silver suit steps into the light, carrying a suitcase. He claims to be the last fellow. Whether the other artists have left, the institution has ceased to exist, or the human world itself has disappeared remains unclear. The catastrophe is never shown. Perhaps it has already happened. Perhaps it is happening now. Villa Massimo is still there, but nature has begun to reclaim it. Grass grows over pathways, plants encroach upon the architecture, insects inhabit the bark of trees, and fish circle through the fountain. The artist moves through this landscape like a relic of his own species. He observes, stretches ribbons between trees, constructs fragile spaces, sleeps, climbs staircases, and looks through binoculars into a world in which his presence appears increasingly insignificant. What initially seems to be the story of the last artist gradually becomes a posthuman fable about humanity’s disappearance from the centre of the world. After centuries of the Anthropocene, during which humans transformed landscapes, displaced species, and turned the climate itself into an architectural material, the relationship is reversed: humanity no longer shapes the world; the world shapes the final traces of humanity. The artist no longer produces in order to change anything. His final activity is observation. Architecture no longer consists of walls, but of wind, shadows, trees, and temporary traces. The binoculars become both an instrument of perception and a symbol of human distance: humanity looks upon a world to which it may no longer belong. Villa Massimo thus becomes a microcosm of a possible future. A place of cultural production is transformed into a landscape after culture. The ecological crisis does not appear as a spectacular end of the world, but as a gradual shift in its order. Monuments lose their meaning, paths their destination, and architecture its permanence. What appears to humans as decay may already be the beginning of something new for other forms of life. In the end, the last fellow disappears as well. What remains is a suitcase, a light among the trees, and the roots.

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Perhaps L’ultimo borsista is therefore less a story about the last artist than about humanity’s final attempt to consider itself important. About the end of the Anthropocene - and about a world that does not end simply because humanity disappears from it.