Arts of the Working Class is a Berlin-born street journal, edited by artist Paul Sochacki, critic Maria Inés Plaza Lazo and curator Alina Ana Kolar. The ‚working class’ referred to is a repositioning of that term in our current society. The paper conveys self-reflexive actions about precarious conditions in the arts and focuses on discourses of contemporary social dynamics happening on different continents and in different languages.
The street journal explores alternatives in a broken terrain of work. Their contributors across mediums document the last heroic deeds of the so-called precarious class within the art system. The visionaries and artists who seek their independent place in the cultural field between ideological tears – usually in vain. The texts are multilingual. The 10,000 copies are currently circulated in London, Berlin, Palermo, Cologne, Stuttgart, Valletta, Vienna, and other cities.
The distribution of the newspaper takes place on the streets of chosen cities, together with homeless, unemployed, or enthusiastic individuals, as well as within certain institutions and galleries. It intends to show an alternative way of art production and distribution, beyond the binary logics of the professional/dilettante, luxury/austerity, commercial/non-commercial. The ones who have no access to the art system are the ones who experience the retribution of that system.
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