Matt Wolf and Eva Díaz on “Spaceship Earth”

Watch a recording of the event here. 

For more than a decade, the filmmaker Matt Wolf has won acclaim for his meticulously crafted documentaries that reveal lost histories through deep dives into media archives. In this conversation, Eva Díaz and Wolf will discuss his latest film, Spaceship Earth (2020), which traces the activities of a counterculture collective known as the Synergists, who spent two years inside Biosphere 2, a self-enclosed ecosystem in the Arizona desert.

In the Winter 2020 issue of Aperture magazine, “Utopia,” artists, photographers, and writers envision a world without prisons, document visionary architecture, honor queer space and creativity, and dream of liberty through spiritual self-expression. They show us that utopia is not a far-fetched scheme, or a “no place” (the literal meaning of the word utopia), but rather a way of reconsidering the everyday.

Matt Wolf (born in San Jose, California, 1982) is a filmmaker based in New York. His critically acclaimed and award-winning documentary films include Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (2008) and Teenage (2013), about early youth culture and the birth of teenagers. Wolf’s recent film Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019) is about the activist who secretly recorded television twenty-four hours a day for thirty years. His newest film, Spaceship Earth (2020), explores Biosphere 2, a controversial experiment in which eight people lived quarantined inside a replica of the planet Earth in the 1990s. Wolf’s many short films include Bayard & Me (2017), about the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, and I Remember: A Film about Joe Brainard (2012).

Eva Díaz is a writer and art critic living in Rockaway Beach, New York. Her writing has appeared in magazines and journals such as Aperture, The Art Bulletin, Artforum, Art Journal, Art in America, Cabinet, Frieze, Grey Room, Harvard Design Magazine, and October, and she is the author of the book The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College, published by University of Chicago Press in 2015. Díaz has recently completed a new book titled After Spaceship Earth; recent sections of the project have appeared in New Left Review, Aperture, e-flux journal, and Texte zur Kunst. The book takes up artists’ challenges to a privatized and highly-surveilled future in outer space, and how the space “race” and colonization can be reformulated as powerful means to readdress economic, gender, and racial inequality, as well as ecological injustices. Díaz teaches art history at Pratt Institute.

Image: Biosphere 2, ca. 1991. All images from the film Spaceship Earth, 2020. Courtesy Matt Wolf

Programming for Aperture magazine’s “Utopia” issue is presented in partnership with London-based fashion brand JW Anderson.