Since 2013, Concrete Flux 流泥 has been a platform for self-determined and unsolicited investigations into urban spaces across China. For Issue 5 we shift focus from the region to explore the possibilities of aesthetic journalism. The micro-issue inaugurates a new direction for the publishing project, towards a sustained investigation into experimental documentary practices that address new visualities and vocabularies. Around this theme, we have gathered dissatisfied journalists, amateur filmmakers, former student leaders, poets and community activists. The resulting articles are experiments in aesthetic journalism as media activism – through a restructuring of the “sensuous parameters of reality itself”. (Bulter, 2010)

Contributors: Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Alfredo Cramerotti, Ana Naomi de Sousa and Twist Qu
Editors: Sophie Dyer and Solveig Suess
Special Editors: Ifor Duncan and Yugong 宫羽
Translation: Ceres Shi 时苒析, Yugong 宫羽 and Jennifer Zhang 张萃
Proofing: Miranda Johnson, Nicola Locatelli and Kevin Xing 邢凯新

Special thanks to Ayşe Güleç, Nora Sternfeld and Peter Suess

Issue V was supported by Tabakalera International Centre for Contemporary Culture in Donostia. An advanced print version was first published on the occasion of the 2018 Logan Symposium, organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London.

Design, in print and online: Rectangle