Auronda Scalera & Alfredo Cramerotti On Digital Art, Cultural Diplomacy, and the Shifting Geography of Culture

In a moment when diplomacy is increasingly tested by fragmentation, acceleration, and competing narratives of power, culture emerges not as a soft supplement to politics, but as one of the few remaining spaces where trust can still be negotiated rather than declared. This conversation with Auronda Scalera and Alfredo Cramerotti explores that terrain with clarity and restraint, asking what it means for art to operate today across geopolitical tension, technological transformation, and shifting cultural authority.

Rather than offering a singular thesis, the dialogue traces a set of interlocking conditions: the rise of digital and AI-driven cultural production, the reconfiguration of institutional legitimacy, and the gradual move away from rigid center–periphery models toward more complex, polycentric cultural ecologies. Within this landscape, cultural diplomacy is no longer understood as representation, but as encounter — unstable, partial, and continuously renegotiated.

CDH Talks: At a time of profound geopolitical change, what role can art and culture play in building trust between nations when traditional diplomatic channels face increasing limitations?

Auronda Scalera: Art operates in a register that is below and beyond official diplomacy — it works on the imagination, on the body, on the capacity for empathy, at a speed and depth that policy cannot reach. What we have learned from years of working across cultures and geographies is that the most durable forms of international trust are built not through institutional agreements but through shared aesthetic experience — through moments when two people from radically different contexts recognize something in the same artwork that neither of them could have articulated in advance. That is, arguably, the foundation of diplomacy.

Alfredo Cramerotti: I would frame it in terms of what art uniquely offers: the permission to hold contradiction without resolving it. Official diplomacy is under perpetual pressure to produce consensus, agreement, a shared narrative. Art has no such obligation. It can hold the pain, the antagonism, the incomprehension between cultures and give them a form that allows them to be witnessed without demanding that they be immediately overcome.

In a moment when geopolitical fault lines are hardening and the language of diplomacy is instrumentalized, that capacity for non-resolution is perhaps the most politically courageous thing that culture can offer. Our role — as curators, as cultural strategists, as advocates for the space that art opens — is to insist on that offer being taken seriously, institutionally and diplomatically, at the highest possible level.

CDH Talks: Can digital art truly become a more effective instrument of cultural diplomacy than traditional cultural programs? What are its key advantages and limitations?

Auronda Scalera: I would resist the word “effective” as if we were measuring output in a spreadsheet. What digital art does differently is collapse the distance – geographic, temporal, institutional – between the moment of creation and the moment of encounter. A virtual exhibition like 404_LAND, which we are opening with HEK Museum of art and tech in Basel in partnership with Tezos Foundation, is accessible simultaneously in Doha, Lagos, Seoul, and São Paulo without requiring a visa, a flight, or a prestigious postcode.

If we consider this a minor logistical detail, it is a structural shift in who gets to be present at the table of cultural exchange. The limitation, however, is that presence is not the same as depth. Diplomacy requires sustained relationship, trust built over time, and digital art can sometimes mistake reach for resonance. We have to be honest about that.

Alfredo Cramerotti: The framing of “more effective” is itself a diplomatic problem, because it presupposes a shared metric. Traditional cultural programs – institutes, festivals, exchange residencies – operate through embodied encounter. They build relationships that are slow, contingent, and irreplaceable. Digital art operates at a different register: it scales and fragments across platforms, it can be experienced simultaneously in contradictory contexts.

What I find genuinely promising is the combinatorial potential – when digital art is embedded within diplomatic frameworks rather than positioned as a replacement for them. The question is whether institutions have the courage and the literacy to design those combinations intentionally, rather than simply migrating existing formats onto digital platforms and calling it innovation.

CDH Talks: To what extent are cultural institutions and their audiences truly prepared to respond to the changes brought about by digital technologies, AI, and new models of cultural participation?

Alfredo Cramerotti: Honestly? Less prepared than they believe themselves to be, and more prepared than their critics suggest. The institutional world has absorbed a tremendous amount of change over the past decade — the pandemic forced a kind of emergency digital transformation that has had lasting effects — but absorption is not the same as comprehension. Many institutions have acquired digital tools without acquiring the conceptual frameworks to understand what those tools are actually doing to the nature of the artwork, the nature of the audience relationship, and the nature of institutional authority.

Artificial intelligence in particular is exposing this gap acutely: it is a challenge to the foundational assumptions about authorship, intention, and interpretation that underpin the entire museum model.

Auronda Scalera: The audience question is the one I find most generative and most underexplored. We tend to discuss audiences as a problem to be solved — how do we reach them, how do we retain them, how do we educate them — rather than as active participants who are already navigating extraordinarily complex digital environments in their daily lives.

Simply put, the audiences for digital art are not passive recipients who need to be guided toward technological literacy. Many of them are far ahead of the institutions. The challenge for museums and curators is to create conditions where the full depth of their existing engagement can be honored and extended. That requires a sort of redistribution of curatorial authority, which is uncomfortable but necessary.

CDH Talks: Do emerging technologies democratize access to art and cultural production, or simultaneously create new forms of inequality and cultural exclusion?

Alfredo Cramerotti: Both, always simultaneously, and anyone who gives you a clean answer to this question is selling something. Technologies do not distribute themselves evenly – they follow existing infrastructures of power, capital, and connectivity. Blockchain-based art ecosystems, for instance, opened extraordinary possibilities for artists in regions previously excluded from the Western gallery market.

But they also introduced new gatekeeping mechanisms – technical literacy requirements, financial speculation, platform dependency – that simply relocated the barriers rather than dismantling them. The honest answer is that democratization and exclusion are not opposites in this field; they are co-produced.

Auronda Scalera: I work across London, Doha, Dubai, and Riyadh, and what I observe is that the geography of access is deeply uneven in ways that are rarely acknowledged in the celebratory discourse around digital culture. When we curated Body Machine (Meridians) with Sougwen Chung in Milan, or when we developed Cosmotechnics: Ding Yi as a Planetary Code in Venice, the technology was always embedded within specific institutional and economic conditions that not every artist or audience could navigate equally.

What I think is underappreciated is the role of the curator as translator between levels of access. Part of our responsibility is to design entry points that don’t require prior fluency in the dominant paradigms of the art market or the tech industry.

CDH Talks: How has digital art transformed the way nations present their cultures on the international stage? Have technological innovations been the primary driver, or have broader social and political processes played an equally important role?

Alfredo Cramerotti: Technology is never the primary driver — it is always co-constituted with social, political, and economic forces. The transformation we are witnessing in how nations use culture internationally is driven as much by the recomposition of geopolitical alliances, by post-colonial reassertions of cultural sovereignty, and by the collapse of certain Western institutional monopolies, as it is by any particular technological development. Digital tools have accelerated and amplified these shifts, made them more visible and more portable — but the underlying forces are profoundly human and profoundly political.

Auronda Scalera: What technology has changed is cultural self-presentation. Nations are less and less dependent on physical pavilions, touring exhibitions, or bilateral cultural agreements to make their cultural production legible internationally. A generative artwork, a blockchain-native commission, a virtual exhibition — these can circulate without institutional mediation in ways that were simply not possible a decade ago.

But I want to insist on the social dimension: the artists we work with at the moment — Gabriel Massan, Hind Al Saad, Varvara & Mar, Alida Sun, Sougwen Chung, Ding Yi, among others — are not deploying technology as a flag for their national identity. They are using it to interrogate identity, to question borders, and, to some extent, propose new cosmologies through those interrogations. The nations that understand this distinction — between cultural diplomacy as propaganda and cultural diplomacy as genuine encounter — are the ones doing the most interesting work.

CDH Talks: Has technological development genuinely contributed to greater intercultural understanding, or has it simultaneously encouraged a stronger turn toward local identities and indigenous cultural narratives?

Alfredo Cramerotti: Again: both, inseparably. The same digital infrastructures that enable unprecedented cross-cultural exchange also provide the reassertion and amplification of local, indigenous, and subaltern identities that were previously marginalized or suppressed by dominant cultural flows. I do not think this is a paradox to be resolved — it is the actual condition of contemporary cultural life, and it is rich and not contradictory. Curatorially, is a matter of resisting the pressure to frame this as a tension between the universal and the particular, and instead to sit with the plurality of what is actually happening.

Auronda Scalera: What I find moving about the artists we work with across our practice is precisely this: they are not choosing between the global and the local. Gabriel Massan is making work that is simultaneously deeply rooted in Brazilian Afro-diasporic experience and fully fluent in the international language of digital and game aesthetics. Ding Yi’s cross-pattern language draws on Chinese visual traditions while engaging with the most advanced discourses in generative aesthetics.

These are not compromises or translations but are syntheses that technology has made possible by creating new platforms for visibility and new communities of interpretation. The turn toward local and indigenous narratives that we are witnessing is, in many cases, the deepest expression of global dialogue.

CDH Talks: Are we witnessing a shift in cultural influence from traditional Western centers toward new regions actively shaping the future of contemporary art?

Auronda Scalera: Unquestionably yes — but the shift is neither linear nor complete, and it is important not to romanticize it. What I see in Doha, in Riyadh, in the broader Gulf region, is a genuine appetite for building cultural infrastructure that is not simply derivative of Western models. Institutions are commissioning new narratives, investing in local and regional artists, and asking fundamental questions about what a museum means in their specific historical and social context.

That is significant. At the same time, the global art market and its validation mechanisms — major biennials, auction houses, critical discourse in English — remain largely centered in a familiar geography. The shift is real, but it is happening within a system that has not yet fully redistributed its authority.

Alfredo Cramerotti:  I would add a methodological caution: the language of “centers” and “peripheries” is itself a Western cartography, and I am skeptical of simply redrawing it with new capitals. What I find more interesting is the emergence of polycentric models — where influence flows not from one dominant node outward, but across a network of nodes that are in genuine dialogue with one another.

The work we do across Venice, London, Doha, and Shanghai is not about claiming that any one of these cities has become the new center. It is about insisting that the conversation is irreducibly plural. That plurality is the actual development — and it requires curatorial frameworks that can hold complexity and not resolve it into a new hierarchy.

CDH Talks: Which countries are currently most successful in integrating digital culture into their international cultural diplomacy strategies, and what lessons can others learn?

Auronda Scalera: South Korea has been remarkable in leveraging digital culture as soft power — partially through top-down cultural policy, and also by creating conditions in which creative industries could genuinely flourish and then travel internationally. The UAE has made extraordinarily ambitious investments in digital cultural infrastructure, and what is interesting is the degree to which those investments are increasingly being matched by serious curatorial thinking, beyond spectacular architecture as Art Dubai Digital that we curated years ago and the announcement of the New Museum of Digital Art in Dubai.

France has maintained a historically-proven model of institutional coherence — the Centre Pompidou network, the Institut français, the early involvement with the Diriyah Art Futures — that gives digital art a stable institutional home without always understanding it. Switzerland has something concrete to show through various initiatives, organisations and collections, though still tentative. Each of these is instructive, but none is simply transferable.

Alfredo Cramerotti:  What I would draw from the more successful examples, besides their specific programs, is an integration of cultural policy with educational infrastructure, with research institutions, and with a willingness to support work that may also be experimental and not simply legible to international markets.

The countries that struggle are those that treat digital culture as a branding exercise — a surface upgrade to existing diplomatic machinery — instead of an invitation to rethink the machinery itself. The lesson is not technological; it is institutional and imaginative.

Auronda Scalera is an Artistic Director, Curator, and Creative Strategist based in London and Doha.

Dr. Alfredo Cramerotti is Director of mm:museum at Northwestern University Qatar and President of IKT (International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art). Together they form one of contemporary art’s most prominent curatorial partnerships, with recent projects including Cosmotechnics: Ding Yi as a Planetary Code (Fondazione Querini Stampalia, in occasion of the Venice Biennale ), Body Machine (Meridians) (Palazzo Citterio, Museum of Digital Art, Milan), and 404_LAND: territory not found (HEK Museum Basel in collaboration with Tezos Foundation).