Arts of the Working Class
Onassis AiR Collaboration
A multilingual street newspaper on the relations between art and society.
Arts of the Working Class (AWC) is a multilingual street newspaper published every two months and covering the relations between art, labor, poverty, wealth and society, circulating worldwide.
It contains contributions by artists and thinkers from different fields and in different languages. Its terms are based upon the working class, meaning everyone, and it reports on everything that belongs to everybody. Everyone who sells this street journal earns money directly. Street vendors keep the entire revenues. Every artist whose work is published or advertised, designs its substance.
BREAKING THE LOOP
In 2022 AWC looks at an overarching theme, namely: LOOPS OF POWER.
We are caught in cycles of consumption, extractivism and oppression. The five issues are published as anti-capitalist solutions to the hell which workers are forced to live in, questioning fashion, tourism, entertainment, weapons and sports.
Our vain beings can be freed from consumerism into anti-waste beauty. Design can be redefined as a social power against the mapping of the world. Music and poetry can produce social poiesis instead of an industry. Violence doesn't have to be distasteful and can be used to destroy or give birth to life. We want to question normativity and understand dis*ability as the counter competition against society as we know it.
Within this framework Οnassis AiR collaborates with Arts of the Working Class to commission five texts for the recurring section in AWC Issues 20-24, 'Breaking the Loop'. Stemming from our yearlong internal process of re-imagining the governance structure of Οnassis AiR together with its participants, we are opening up this process to our peers. Arts of the Working Class becomes our platform of exchange. In each issue we invite a local space, an initiative or an arts worker based in Αthens to reflect together with us on the institutions that we need today. The language used for each text will be decided by the commissioned initiatives each time. Each upcoming issue will be available for pick-up in Αthens at each participating space, as well as at Οnassis AiR.
