Almost nine years of publishing, thousands of collaborations, and a new online infrastructure for Arts of the Working Class.
Arts of the Working Class (AWC) soft introduces its new digital archive at artsoftheworkingclass.org, bringing together almost eight years of publishing on art, labor, poverty, and wealth.
When AWC began publishing in 2018, questions of class and economic inequality were far less prominent in contemporary art discourse. Today, their growing visibility has done little to resolve the contradictions they expose: art generates value while the labor behind it remains precarious and often invisible. Poverty and wealth continue to determine who can produce art and under what conditions.
Amid seemingly endless wars and the rise of what artist Cibelle Cavalli Bastos calls technofascism, AWC has spent the past year reorganizing its collective editorial work. As digital infrastructures become increasingly concentrated in private hands, the dynamics described by Yanis Varoufakis as technofeudalism and by Roberto Trillo and Marek Poliks as exocapitalism make the question of who controls the circulation of knowledge all the more urgent.
The new archive brings past issues and contributions into relation, making it easier to navigate authors and subjects while discovering connections across different moments of struggle. Rather than presenting a completed institutional history, it makes visible the ongoing exchanges that have shaped AWC.
The archive is under construction, as is the work itself.
For AWC, publishing means nurturing artistic and cultural plurality while confronting the material conditions that sustain it. This plurality takes shape in Dalia Maini's reading of Anton Jäger's Hyperpolitics, on the distance between political mobilization and organization; in María Inés Plaza Lazo’s conversation with Gala Porras-Kim and Ana María Millán on Museum as Sundial at the Van Abbemuseum; and in Abel Hartooni's review of Anna Boghiguian's Weaving Culture, tracing histories of displacement through textile work. It also takes poetic form in Liola Mattheis's CC Forever, unsettling the promises of community, and a critical turn in Miles Pflanz's review of Andrea Fogarassi's Material Show in Vienna.
These recent contributions continue AWC’s commitment to keeping collective knowledge accessible, open to disagreement, and available for further use. Against the isolation of our times, the relationships sustained through publishing need to be strengthened rather than merely documented.
The transformation also extends to AWC's printed form. Working with Studio Manuel Raeder, AWC is developing a typographic system that combines the continuity of Timezone and Plätze with changing typefaces selected for each issue. The design retains a recognizable structure while allowing the work of featured artists to interrupt it. Typography becomes part of the editorial process, rather than a neutral container for its content.
More than a website, the new archive is a platform for continuing this work. It brings our publications and communications into a shared space, with the ambition of becoming more informative, but no less poetic.
Access remains free, but the labor behind it is not. To sustain independent publishing, AWC has introduced three membership tiers: Reader, for individuals and collectives; Partner, for institutions and organizations; and Redistributor, for those able to contribute more. Membership helps remunerate contributors and sustain editorial work, printing, and circulation. It follows a principle of redistribution: those who can contribute more help keep the work accessible to those who cannot.
We invite you to explore the archive, revisit past contributions, and take part in the conversations still unfolding.
Not everything that circulates is shared. Not everything that is preserved remains alive. Read. Support. Go out to the streets.
