Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Ethnography by Paolo Magagnoli

Abstract

Reviewed by: Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Ethnography by Paolo Magagnoli Kamil Lipiński Magagnoli, Paolo. Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Ethnography. Wallflower Press, 2015. 215pp. 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 imagining the future. Second, he aims to understand how a thoroughly utopian look into the past can help us capture what is utopian and cognitively noteworthy in these representations. Oscillating between one context and another, the author constructs a discourse around a feature axis that allows him to grasp the nostalgia that resounds in today's discussion of how memory is expressed in art. Magagnoli advances the thesis that this is an essentially reactionary attitude in which the artist seeks a return to historiography as a way of reliving the past. The author looks for signs of consumer capitalism in the films, photographic documentary images and internet connections he studies. Magagnoli's research recalls Bernard Stiegler's understanding of the ways technology enables the exteriorization of repressed, utopian visions of the past. The notion of utopia introduced in his title also suggests Ernest Bloch's views on imagination, emotions, and desires, and on the emancipatory potential they hold for building on past failures. The vision of utopia imagined by Magagnoli is mirrored in daydreaming, fairy tales, myth, travelogues, and in all manner of artistic, literary, and even religious expression seeking to articulate a world in which hope becomes a cognitive act that serves as catalyst for social change. His understanding of utopia also evokes the [End Page 115] historicist perspectives of Thomas More and Gianni Vattimo, a perspective that enables a critical and progressive approach to nostalgia and lets him diagnose a "missing something" in the contemporary political and cultural landscape. In this light, Magagnoli's book outlines the image of social utopia presented in various artistic forms and developments. The author sketches "distorted mirrors" of a real place that are juxtaposed with fragments of images from different periods, yet that are seen in terms of another place. For Magagnoli, it is important to try to introduce a perceived heterotopic grid that simultaneously captures the coexistence of many transient events and various temporal narratives, an approach that Gianni Vattimo has advocated. Magagnoli does not limit himself to discussing the philosophical dimension of the utopia he analyzes, but also seeks to specify the dimensions of the application of philosophical thought to critical strategies that involve appropriation, re-enactment, and architectural ruin. The first of these strategies concerns recycling old visual themes and content as a characteristic feature of postmodernism. Theoretically speaking, this move manifests as a sense of the general loss of historicity and the exhaustion of those creative and utopian forces that had created modernity. The second of these strategies (re-enactment) concerns the resurrection of various documentary and indexical materials such as drawings and photographs, transforming them into short and abstract forms of moving images. Rather than having parodistic intentions, these expressions can be perceived as ritual performances that restore the past. The third element, architectural ruin, entails reflections on how a given culture transforms its standing in a situation when an obsession with utopian failure is characteristic of a current situation. A symptomatic expression of this first strategy is the utopian combination of old-fashionedness and futurism in Tacity Dean's Bubble House (1999), which Magagnoli refers to as a form of "inverted ruin." This building appears as a symbol of the desires of modern societies and their drive to create an imaginary structure based on the play of light and sound, paradoxically accenting the imperishable. Magagnoli discerns the...