Abstract

In Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Ethnography, Paolo Magagnoli has undertaken the complex task of linking different aesthetic contexts through a study of experimental documentary audiovisual projects, treating the work of contemporary artists such as Hito Steyerl, Joachim Koester, Tacite Dean, Matthew Buckingham, Zoe Leonard, Jean-Luc Moulène, Ilye and Emilie Kabakov, Jon Thompson and Alison Craighead, and Aniri Sala. In what follows, I wish to develop three critical arguments that I hope will illuminate the book's central claims. Magagnoli's main goal is to understand how these artists' utopian vision has undergone a temporal shift that is more preoccupied with remembering the past than...