Les Sentiers de l’Utopie by Isabelle Fremeaux, John Jordan (review)

Les Sentiers de l’Utopie (Utopia’s Trails) is, as the inscription on the cover intriguingly indicates, a book-film. And I say intriguingly because one immediately realizes that it is not just a narrative rendered through two different media. On the back cover, the reader finds an elucidating piece of information: The book is an account of the history and practices of several European intentional communities visited by Isabelle Fremeaux and John Jordan throughout a year; and the film is what the authors call “docu-fiction,” a poetic road movie set in the future and composed of images filmed during that period. There is, in fact, an interesting interaction between the book and the film: The first describes reality, but one that lies on the margins; the latter depicts times that can well lie ahead, but only in the understanding that the margins become the center. The rationale behind all euchronic accounts is thus rendered visible and is clearly played up by the sentence on the inner cover of the book—the first sentence that the reader is obviously bound to read: “Beware of the present you are creating, as it should resemble the future of which you dream.”

In the “Note to Readers and Spectators,” Fremeaux and Jordan put forward the idea that because we are confronted with apocalyptic descriptions everyday (climatic catastrophes, energetic shortenings, extinction of species, etc.), our utopian imagination has been stunted. That is precisely why thinking of the unimaginable is ever more important. This conviction led the authors to spend seven months visiting people who live in heterotopian spaces—experimentation camps, social laboratories, as Fremeaux and Jordan describe them. On the whole Fremeaux and Jordan visited “Camp Climat” (a temporary ecologist camp that, when the authors visited it, was set near Heathrow airport, England), “Landmatters” (one of the most ecologically sustainable communities in England), “Paideia” (a school in Merida, Spain, where an anarchist educational philosophy prevails), “Marinaleda” (a social-democratic and cooperative municipality in the province of Seville, Andalusia, Spain), “Can Masdeu” (a squatted social center, residence, and community garden in the outskirts of Barcelona, Spain), “La Vieille Valette” (a communal settlement in France, a rural pluri-active space where a group of artists live according to the rule “Neither God nor Master”), “Cravirola” (a French agriculture cooperative where a small pocket of people live and experiment life based on the idea of a common usage of the land in the spirit of total equality), “Longo Maï” (the antimilitarist, anticapitalist, and egalitarian cooperative community set in Limans, France, which follows the anarchist ideology of Roland Perrot), “Jogoremedija” (a pharmaceutical factory in Zrenjanin, Serbia, where its workers formed an alliance and invested in a struggle against the privatization of the company), ZEGG (a German eco-village aiming to develop and implement practical models for a socially and ecologically sustainable way of living, where the politics of free love prevail), and “Christiania” (a Danish self-proclaimed autonomous neighborhood started in 1971, where people live according to a new set of rules that are independent from the Danish government).

Although Fremeaux and Jordan are evidently enthusiastic about the ideas  that are behind the social experiments they describe, their depiction does not try to hide the frailties of the projects, thus providing the reader with a factual account of their nature. One can thus easily perceive that the reach of some of the experiments is very limited and that their utopian dimension may somehow have lost some of the initial radiance.

The book is offered in a truly didactic spirit, since each and every section is preceded by an explanation of its utopian scope. Thus, we are told that these utopian experiments are to be understood in the light of the belief in Nowtopias, as utopia is not to be seen as the search for perfection in a future society but, rather, as a practice in the here and now (36–37); that the idea of a garden-forest perfectly fits into...