'Something is missing', Bertolt Brecht's minimalist definition of utopia, remains paradigmatic today. Something is still missing, and searching for this something means articulating the blanks, the 'where', 'when' and 'why' that circumscribe it. By means of those interrogations, the vague and seemingly outmoded idea of utopia might become material, historically precise, graspable and, ultimately, a thing of the present.

Hito Steyerl's films and videos manifest such a historical precision - one that reconstructs the past and the present from the perspective of their deficiency. The notion that 'something is missing' lies at their core: her moving-image narrations focus on minor historical instances plagued by disappearances and lacks, and relocate them at the centre of contemporary cultural production. Steyerl positions fiction and documentary alongside each other, suggesting that their sharp distinction is a function of their ideological roles in contemporary society, rather than the result of a significant difference in their relation to reality. In Steyerl's work, fiction is presented as the form necessarily adopted by contemporary documentation. The techniques of essay composition that she employs enable her to expand the limits of art as a branch of cultural production, interweaving images of mass culture, documentary footage and personal stories with interviews and other audio recordings. The unwillingness to be circumscribed that Theodor W. Adorno identified as characteristic of the essay form, its tendency to turn 'interpretations … always into over-interpretations', results in Steyerl's works being panoramic not only in their extrapolation of their subject onto multiple levels, but also in the fact that those levels are always referred back onto one another.² Because of that, Steyerl's films could be described as purposeful 'over-interpretations' of the present.

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