Art Chasing Fraud: Parajournalism and Transmedia Storytelling

Abstract

Artists such as Mark Lombardi, Paolo Cirio, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, and Paolo Woods and Gabriele Galimberti have realized projects which deconstruct complex systems hidden below layers of subterfuge and misdirection, merging original research with creative practice. Through multiple formal languages, the artists trace the transactionary pathways of global tax evasion, fraud, and corruption. This form of transmedia storytelling has emerged as an important practice in recent art – one which is discussed as the documentary-, pedagogical-, and journalistic-turn, as well as the more recent, aesthetic journalism. Here, however, I not interested in considerations of the artist as witness, reporter, or documentarian of a contemporaneous environment. Rather, I am interested in plotting connections between experiments in information gathering and sharing, and broader shifts in how that information is distributed and valued. The shorthand I propose for discussing art which narrates in a ‘proximal system,’ alongside but also separate from the practice of reporting, is parajournalism. Like a personal blog as opposed to an investigative news article, parajournalism is related to but remains separate from professional journalism. While journalism is ideologically grounded in fact-based narratives and corroborated sources, parajournalism interweaves statistics and personal accounts into a story less bound to facts than to the visualizing of systems through an aesthetic lens – spotlighting a larger, but no less real, issue. While the artist-practitioners under consideration here make no claims to journalistic authority, they nonetheless mobilize the tools of the trade to tell a story.