On the morning of May 8, under a light rain, members of Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) gathered at a cafe on Viale Garibaldi. We were surrounded by visitors navigating their way through the 61st Venice Biennale’s professional preview. We split into two teams, one headed toward the Arsenale, the other to the Giardini, moving door to door, speaking with attendants and front-of-house staff about the strike called for that day. Organized with Biennalocene, Vogliamo Tutt’altro, Sale Docks, Mi Riconosci, and Italian trade unions including ADL Cobas, USB, and CUB, the strike was a day of material refusal called in support of Palestine and workers’ rights, and carried out under the auspices of Italian labor law.1 The strike had started at midnight and was to proceed for twenty-four hours. From that morning until well into the afternoon, buoyed by ever-increasing participation, ANGA members organized artists and art workers to join the strike.
The May 8 Strike was made possible through an internationalist approach that maintained a sustained presence in the Italian context—attending assemblies, building relationships with local activists, and anchoring demands to existing structures of labor law rather than going around them. This scaffolding was held in intimate coordination with cultural organizations and grassroots trade unions. Central to ANGA’s framework is an expansive definition of cultural work that recognizes attendants, front-of-house staff, and art handlers as workers with the same standing as artists and curators. We insist that the cultural sector is not exempt from the political responsibilities that have animated transportation workers and dockworkers refusing to move Israeli cargo. The question of Palestine is contiguous with the labor demands of the cultural sector.
The Need to Strike
To free oneself from politics is an attempt to free oneself from context. For a cultural worker to internalize this limit is to consent in advance to censorship and violence. Over many months, ANGA held assemblies and one-on-one conversations with artists from “In Minor Keys” and with representatives from national pavilions, working through the fraught questions of what participation, absence, and presence could mean in a context where every choice carries weight. Some of those conversations were inconclusive, others transformative, with a number of participants moving from deliberation into active organizing—mobilizing their own networks and drawing new voices into the campaign that expanded the coalition far beyond its original core. Numerous artists who joined the campaign did not have artistic practices organized around Palestine, anti-colonialism, or war—a reminder that one’s practice and one’s praxis can be unrelated.2
Through bureaucratic and financial means, art institutions have helped dismantle the very conditions that sustain praxis. By issuing artist contracts at the last minute and providing insecure funding, art institutions isolate artists and place the burden of any political claim on the individual rather than the institution. At the Venice Biennale, as with cultural institutions across the Western world, the risk of acting with political integrity has been quietly transferred onto invited artists, curators, and workers, while the institution publicly disavows any responsibility for the consequences. This dynamic is evident in the current case of numerous Biennale artists who have asked for their names to be withdrawn from the Visitors’ Lions award following the resignation of the jury, a request that the Biennale has thus far ignored.3 Artists and art workers labor under conditions of censorship in the form of the repressive meritocracy of cultural governance: While contemporary art is propagandized as the triumph of freedom, a web of granting structures, private funding, patronage networks, and institutions determines which art is seen on a national or international stage and which is not.
Likewise, art-washing occurs when an institution deploys cultural prestige to legitimize or obscure political violence, using the political content of artistic practice to signal openness while also foreclosing the conditions under which real dissent by artists is possible. This continuous navigation of context—of what can be said, shown, refused, or demanded in any given institutional setting—is central to the role of artists, curators, and producers. The traditions of May 1968, leftist histories, and the language of class struggle have long carried a certain institutional prestige in Western cultural contexts. Yet, speaking now about Palestine and genocide is treated as a dangerous breach of professional etiquette. The personal risk of reputational damage and loss of income has dissuaded even those with anti-colonial and anti-Zionist stances from publicly articulating their beliefs.4
Historical Precedents and Remobilizing Political Struggle
The 1936 general strike in Palestine remains one of the most significant precedents for understanding the strike as more than just a workplace tactic. Called by the Arab Higher Committee in opposition to British colonial rule, land dispossession, and Zionist settlement, the strike lasted six months and transformed the withdrawal of labor into a form of collective political refusal. It established a tradition in which strikes could articulate demands that exceeded the immediate workplace, linking economic disruption to broader struggles over sovereignty, territory, and liberation. Such understanding persisted through the First Intifada in 1987, where coordinated strikes became central to everyday resistance across the occupied territories, and later informed the 2004 call issued by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which positions culture not as a secondary sphere but as a constitutive terrain of political struggle.
The history of labor conflict at the Venice Biennale offers an instructive example of how workers have sought to transform fragmented cultural labor into a collective political subject. While the protests of 1968 are well documented, what followed is far less known. In 1978, approximately three hundred precarious workers, many emerging from the movements of 1977, were hired as gallery attendants and immediately began organizing. They won the right to sit during shifts, rejected military-style uniforms, and redistributed catalogue sales income equally. They proposed that the Biennale fund a paid training program for cultural workers who would then be permanently employed within Venice’s cultural institutions. When management refused, workers went on strike, occupied the Magazzini del Sale for a week, and established an assembly of precarious and unemployed workers that outlasted the exhibition itself.
By 1982, management deliberately misclassified attendants as lower-paid “ushers.” The response took the form of a work-to-rule action: If their contracts identified them as ushers, they would only carry out usher duties, abandoning exhibition spaces to monitor external entrances, thus exposing the institution’s dependence on their labor by adhering precisely to the contractual definition imposed upon them.
The final major confrontation came in 2009, when the Biennale moved to outsource its remaining directly employed attendants and security staff, stripping them of rehiring protections won through decades of struggle. Workers organized strikes and pickets at the Giardini entrance, but the conflict unfolded in near-total isolation. Artists continued exhibiting, office staff kept working, and visitors kept entering. Through partial concessions and divide-and-rule tactics, management fragmented the workforce until the movement collapsed. It was the last significant expression of a militancy steadily eroded through atomization, the retreat of trade unions from antagonistic politics, and an educational system oriented toward producing entrepreneurial subjects rather than members of a class.
It is in this context that Palestine emerges as a potential terrain for class recomposition—not only because Palestine has become the point at which the colonial and authoritarian character of Western cultural institutions appears most clearly, but also because it provides a common political contradiction capable of traversing the divisions that structure cultural labor. The choice of the strike as part of ANGA’s broader campaign to boycott the Israeli Pavilion was informed by two considerations. The first was the memory of the successful Italian general strikes for Palestine in 2025, which restored political meaning to the refusal of work. The second was a conception of the strike not as the expression of an already constituted class, but as a process through which class itself is formed. We do not strike because we are cultural workers. Rather, it is through the shared practice of striking that we come to recognize ourselves as cultural workers and, potentially, as a political force.
Palestine Is the Future of the World
Today, May 8 stands as the largest strike in the history of the Venice Biennale and the first by cultural workers since 1968.5
By our count, thirty of the one hundred national pavilions partially or fully closed, along with two collateral exhibitions, and fifteen “In Minor Keys” artists closed their doors, draped, and altered their work.6 This strike materialized from intense coordination by ANGA, together with the decades-long existence of organizations, cultural spaces, and political collectives across Italy that have continued to resist erasure despite political attacks, economic pressure, and the persistent lack of support from the institutional cultural sector.On March 17, 2026, ANGA issued a letter ahead of the opening of the 61st Venice Biennale, formally delivered to the president and board of the Biennale. Signed by 240 artists, curators, and art workers, and eighteen national pavilion teams, it demanded Israel’s exclusion on the grounds that genocide cannot be tolerated by an institution that claims to celebrate the human values embodied by art. The Biennale did not respond and the letter became the basis for the May 8 strike and two demonstrations called by ANGA together with Biennalocene, Vogliamo Tutt’altro, Mi Riconosci, Sale Docks, and Italian trade unions.7 The same groups continue to build on this infrastructure through organizing, including the national general cultural strike called in Italy for June 12, an escalation of the May 8 strike, which acts as both prelude and prefiguration.8 Carried out in coalition with labor unions, the May 8 strike demonstrated that cultural workers can halt the functioning of one of the world’s most prestigious cultural institutions, exposing the degree to which that institution depends on the voluntary compliance of the very people it underpays and doesn’t always protect. We described the strike as a collective refusal—a refusal of genocide normalization in culture and of the precarious labor conditions that cultural institutions are built on.
The structural transformation of Italian cultural institutions under Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni is one of the major factors shaping the situation of the Venice Biennale today. Since 2022, Meloni’s government has systematically inserted politically aligned figures into Italy’s cultural infrastructure: at the national broadcaster, RAI; at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the world’s oldest film school; and at the Venice Biennale itself, where Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, a former youth leader of the neofascist Italian Social Movement, now serves as president of the Biennale Foundation. Alessandro Giuli, Italy’s current minister of culture, was a member of the neofascist group Meridiano Zero before leading the MAXXI national museum and taking ministerial office. Furthermore, the 2025 Security Decree criminalizes passive protest, including road blockades and unauthorized sit-ins. These appointments and policies form a coherent loyalist architecture.
Across Europe, the same logic operates through different instruments. In Germany, cultural funding is tied to compliance with a definition of anti-Semitism broad enough to silence Palestinian voices and their allies. In the UK, universities have obtained High Court injunctions reclassifying their own students as trespassers on campuses for acts of protest, with some students issued bail conditions banning them from setting foot on other university grounds. Classical fascism was loudly announced through the spectacles of the march, the uniform, and paramilitary violence in the street. Its terror was theatrical. Violence was meant to be seen, as a warning about the bodily cost of resistance. Post-fascism in our times operates in the dark, working through the existing architecture of democratic institutions rather than immediately dismantling them, and using existing procedures and legal frameworks against those people that democratic institutions are nominally supposed to protect. This is a fascism that unfolds primarily through administration.
Durable forms of political repression are not those administered by true believers acting from ideology but by functionaries acting according to procedure.9 The person processing the funding rejection does not think of themself as a censor. The university lawyer who drafts the injunction does not think of themself as an agent of repression. The minister who places a loyalist at the head of a cultural institution describes it as a routine appointment. The dispersal of agency across a bureaucratic apparatus is precisely what makes the violence hard to name and harder to oppose. The result is best described as bureaucratic terror that emerges as a sustained atmosphere in which people modify their own behavior, self-censor, decline to sign, and withdraw from visibility because they cannot calculate where the line is and cannot afford to find out. The willingness to suppress solidarity with Palestine, reshape legal frameworks, redefine anti-Semitism, criminalize protest, and install loyalists across cultural institutions tells us exactly how far these structures are prepared to go, and how much of the existing order they are willing to redirect in order to do it.
ANGA Is a School
We formed ANGA because we believe that art is not a luxury or a platform, but a way people make sense of being alive. That belief brought us together and it is what sustains the alliances we build. These aren’t temporary coalitions of convenience but networks committed to life-affirming structures, to the long work of keeping Palestine present, visible, and central to how we understand our praxis. Struggling for Palestine also means building our own liberation. ANGA is a training in autonomy from an art system that continues to reveal its dependence on Zionism. It is also dedicated to abolition, which involves a double movement. The first is destituent: a genuine break with toxic institutions, not their reform. The second is instituent: building different infrastructure while the struggle is underway, through organizing with occupied spaces, holding assemblies of cultural workers, and establishing institutions willing to serve new forms of autonomy.10 ANGA is an ongoing work of organization, a school with a program of absolute disorder11—one which sees Palestine as the world in its future tense.
Biennalocene, Vogliamo Tutt’altro, Sale Docks, and Mi Riconosci are organizations, assemblies, and self-organized spaces for cultural workers based in Venice, Rome, and other Italian cities. For years they have been fighting for better working conditions and labor rights in the cultural sector. The three Italian trade unions that joined the May 8 Strike—ADL Cobas (Associazione Difesa Lavoratori, Workers’ Defense Association, Comitati di Base), USB (Unione Sindacale di Base, Basic Trade Union), and CUB (Confederazione Unitaria di Base, Unitary Confederation of Base Unions)—were all rank-and-file unions operating outside the mainstream confederal labor movement. Their participation guaranteed legal strike protections for the art workers.
See ANGA, “No Show at Venice,” The Key, May 20, 2026 →: “As powerful as artistic interventions in the name of Palestine can be, it is critical to maintain a distinction between the sublimation of political potential into artistic practice and collective movements aimed at refusing the institutional infrastructure writ large.”
In “Artists Call Out Venice Biennale for Disregarding Their Repeated Requests to Be Withdrawn from ‘Visitors’ Lions’ Awards,” published on e-flux Notes, June 3, 2026, thirty seven artists, collectives, and estates from “In Minor Keys” and thirty-nine national pavilions reiterated their demand to withdraw from the Visitors’ Lion, threatening legal action if this was not honored.
Edward Said wrote, “Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship.” Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (Vintage, 1994), 100–1.
In 1968, the boycotts took a different form, with multiple campaign platforms and actions, and were not organized as one total labor strike. There was a “boycott the Biennale” movement, which was extraordinary, but it was not an official strike action, run with unions with labor protection. See →.
Participating pavilions included: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Catalonia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Iceland, Italy (by the performers), Ireland, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Türkiye, and the UK. The two collateral exhibitions that shut their doors were “Ocean Space” and “If All Time Is Eternally Present.” The fifteen artists who covered, altered, or posted on their works in solidarity were Alfredo Jaar, Alice Maher, Alan Phelan, Carolina Cayedo, Carrie Schneider, Gala Porras-Kim, Hagar Ophir, Mohammed Joha, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Rachel Fallon, Sohrab Hura, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Tabita Rezaire, Vera Tamari, Yo-E Ryou. Full stats can be found at →.
On May 6, the first day of the Biennale’s opening week, a demonstration was held outside the Israeli Pavilion in the Arsenale. Artists from “In Minor Keys,” including Nolan Oswald Dennis and Tabita Rezaire, addressed the crowd. Two days later, on May 8, over 3,500 people marched from Viale Garibaldi to the Arsenale in the largest demonstration in the Biennale’s history. Speakers included Gabrielle Goliath, whose exhibition for the South African Pavilion had been abruptly withdrawn by the South African government and relocated independently to the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin; Mohammed Joha, a Gazan artist showing in “In Minor Keys”; and Caroline Dumalin, curator of the Belgian Pavilion.
The demands accompanying the upcoming general strike have remained the same for years: the recognition of cultural work; fair wages and dignified working conditions; the protection of workers’ health, safety, and well-being; the full implementation of sectoral collective agreements; universal welfare; and an end to the war economy and art-washing within cultural institutions.
Hannah Arendt developed the concept of the “banality of evil” through her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, arguing that the most catastrophic forms of political violence are often perpetrated not by fanatics or sadists but by ordinary bureaucrats who subordinate moral judgment to procedural compliance. Eichmann, in her account, was not driven by ideological hatred but by a failure to think, a suspension of moral agency in favor of administrative function. See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Viking Press, 1963).
The concept of destituent power is developed by Giorgio Agamben in The Use of Bodies (Stanford University Press, 2016). On instituent practices in the context of cultural institutions, see Gerald Raunig, “Instituent Practices: Fleeing, Instituting, Transforming,” in Art and Contemporary Critical Practice, ed. Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (MayFly Books, 2009).
Françoise Vergès, A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum, trans. Melissa Thackway (Pluto Press, 2024). Vergès draws the idea of a “program of absolute disorder” from Fanon.
