‘Perfection’

« An Italian artist and a writer, Vincenzo Latronico’s masterpiece is about a couple of millennial digital artists, Anna and Tom, who moved from the south of Europe to Berlin during Angela Merkel’s second term. There’s a strong focus on the material, their online identities, and of course, the city. That idea that they’re maybe at the right place at the right time, but it sort of feels also very vacuous, very empty.

It’s incredibly well executed, well written. Very precise, razor sharp. Like one of Perec’s story of the 60s. And brilliantly translated by Sophie Hughes. It’s a kind of a mirror with a delay, one of the great novels of the Instagram age. Rapture, conflict, depth, all of that seems to be missing. Adorno talked once about utopia as something is missing. There is a lot missing in the life of the protagonists. They don’t seem to be really alive.

It’s a kind of a superficial surface and a kind of a fear of anything which could be messy. So it’s very much a book about life as an image, and not a lived experience. This is why it all feels the same, no? And at the same time, there is no kind of moral judgment involved. It’s just an observation, a very astute observation of the extreme present, an archive of the extreme present of a generation. » Hans Ulrich Obrist

'Perfection'

Author: Vincenzo Latronico

Selected by Hans Ulrich Obrist

Type: Book

Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions