Alfredo Cramerotti

Aesthetic Journalism

News Media and Artistic Platforms in Contemporary Society

Alfredo CRAMEROTTI’s research at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen investigated the current tendency to merge artistic practice with the spheres of documentary and journalism, an under-theorized area relevant to both media productions and exhibition platforms. The attempt to map this field, here defined as aesthetic journalism, necessarily moves through the figure of the artist-producer who works as a journalist and/or documentarist responding to current events, departing from the traditions of both fields.

The research on this emergent form of journalism—as a process of knowledge production—takes into account both art and news media platforms, focusing on the journalist and artist’s “performativity”, its reception by different audiences and the development of tools of mediation through a combination of intellectual speculation and media and artistic research.

Investigations conducted during the fellowship involved interview sessions and speculative analysis through written and video material. Findings became the material for Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform Without Informing, a publication released in 2009 as part of the Büchs’n’Books—Art and Knowledge Production in Context series.

Cramerotti organized a series of lectures and discussions on the topic at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, both as a fellow and in the year following his residency.

Alfredo CRAMEROTTI (*1967 in Trento, Italy) is an author and cultural producer based in the UK. He is engaged in a narrative-based practice that investigates notions of representation and reality across a variety of media. He works with writing (art and media critique, essays) and mass media. Cramerotti was co-curator of Manifesta 8, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, in Murcia and Cartagena, Spain 2010/11 together with Khaled Ramadan as CPS (Chamber of Public Secrets).

www.alcramer.net