ABSTRACT
The potentialities and aporias of counterfactual history also bring the reader, productively, towards an analysis of its better-known counterpart: utopia. Political utopia and counterfactual history are linked to rewrite Europe's political past and present as well as the instruments of politically committed art. Bartana's plea to rewrite history does not offer itself as a free political utopia but is concretely linked to an attempt to make amends for the past, to heal a historical trauma. Bartana's Polish trilogy uses art as a historiographic instrument: by telling history in "reverse," as she puts it, she developed a utopian vision of turning back the wheel of history. Healing the "shared" Polish-Jewish trauma is promised by the utopia of a reversal of history that simultaneously represents a geographical reversal-a return home. Bartana's appropriation of utopia comes with a recourse to history that is based upon a specific understanding of the relationship between art and politics.
