Arts of the Working Class Issue #36: Experience

Label / Arts Of The Working Class
Category / Art, Theory, Politics
Code / 9772627698496

This issue, the first under the thematic umbrella of Value Attachment, seeks to reclaim shared experiences and ground them in forms of transactionality that reveal and challenge the logic of the capitalist system. Accordingly, we ask: Which experiences are valued? Who values them for which reasons? How come experiences of interdependence and pain tend to be hidden, while those that show us as able, autonomous and rich are cherished? We turn to art forms and collective practices that reside in the messiness of struggle, love, and memory. Here, experience is neither sanitized nor transactional. It is presented in its rawness, or shaped by the slow labor of time, where wisdom does not flow lightly like water, but emerges thick and opaque, like a primordial broth. In the Art in Context section, we draw from Bracha L. Ettinger’s matriarchal gaze on time and trauma, as embodied in her retrospective at K21 in Düsseldorf, visual hymns to interconnectedness against a world marked by profound division. To deepen and pluralize this exploration, we turn to works from the 16th Sharjah Biennial, tracing a lineage of transgenerational experiences through visual and cultural expressions from Oceania to Africa, Asia, and South America. These works chart distinct lived experiences while revealing the interdependencies that bind them. Similarly, the group exhibition “Accumulation (Part I)” at the Migros Museum in Zürich confronts emotional, material, and existential textures of scarcity, urging us to rethink what it means to live within systems of extraction and deprivation. Our first open call (to date) invited you to contribute to a brand new section of our editorial core entitled Commonplace, offering a space to foreground the political and poetic dimensions of the everyday to everyone. We are deeply grateful to all who submitted. From the selected contributions, we share narratives of labor struggles and attempts to rehumanize production; reflections on how society is shaped by grief and rage; and gestures of daily militancy and alter-institutionality – ranging from the museum to the meme. In our Phenomena section, we spotlight the enduring work of the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), which this year marks four decades of cultural labor rooted in class struggle on Skid Row in Los Angeles. We talked to its co-founders John Malpede and Henriette Brouwers about reclaiming performance as a vehicle for consciousness-raising, community organizing, and resistance to violence of displacement and speculative urban development. In Specialists, we speak with Yuliana Caffé, Yudi Rafael, and Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, curators of the exhibition “Occupation, Construction” at the Fowler Museum (UCLA), opening up the conceptual and political backstage of an exhibition where grassroots cultural practices in Brazil are put in dialogue with Los Angeles’ own, offering examples of community-led sustainable futures. Last, but not least, this issue launches a series of columns centered on the economic dimensions of art, confronting the art market and its inherent inequalities. These contributions – by Catwings, Sepp Eckenhaussen, Prof. Dr. Hubertus Kohle, Clemente Ciarrocca, Lilo Ruminawi, and Nachbarschaftshaus Urbanstraße e.V. – aim to reframe our understanding of experience, shifting it beyond the commodification of labor and toward collective, materialist imaginaries that resist capitalist valuation. The meme on our cover is taken from an IG story from the media platform and community New Models and points to the annihilatory gesture of recreating the rich visual language of Studio Ghibli in endless AI-generated images. It tells us, “the world we live in no longer exists” and, while capitalism relentlessly reinvents itself, we know that its roots are always the same. This issue is dedicated to exposing those roots and to the transformative experiences that arise from resisting them. In Gratitude, AWC With contributions by Octavia Abril, Aysel Akhundova, anonymer Arbeiterin, Marco Baravalle, Jamila Barakat, Juliana Caffé, Zeliha B. Cenkci, Irene Chin, Casual Staff, Catwings, Bracha L. Ettinger, Sepp Eckenhaussen, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, Food Culture Days, Francesco Garutti, Giulia Mariachiara Galiano, Natasha Ginwala, Myour Gape, María Inés Plaza Lazo, Prof. Dr. Hubertus Kohle, John Malpede, Dalia Maini, Giulia Mariachiara Galiano, Alesa Mustar, Nachbarschaftshaus Urbanstraße e.V., Zeynep Öz, Frankie Pizá, María Inés Plaza Lazo, LA Poverty Department, Lilo Ruminawi, Pauł Sochacki, Jayanthan Sriram, Boris Suyderhoud, Rita Torres, Yudi Rafael, Alia Swastika, Rico Zyrrano.

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Arts of the Working Class Issue #36: Experience

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