RESET

This paper still exists because it has to. Not as a singular voice, but as a porous front—passed from hand to hand, reshaped by those who write for it, read it, sell it, and push it forward. It does not merely document the arts and its workers; it moves through realities—on the streets, within labor structures, across borders, among both the international Intelligenzija and all sorts of elites. It is carried by those who refuse invisibility, who refuse to let culture be reduced to capital or confined to the interests of the few.

To sustain AWC is to recognize that critique, radical imagination, and artistic practice cannot survive in isolation. They must circulate, be accountable, be redistributed, and build economies that do everything but extract—economies willing to transform into common infrastructures. A commons does not self-perpetuate; it must be insisted upon, returning to the many communities it exists through, renegotiating what it means to be in commons, again and again.

This issue pursues a reset—not as a plea for charity or recognition, but as an invitation to shape the street newspaper’s focus. No niche, however irresistible your ideals can be, justifies gatekeeping. Culture is not a product to be consumed but a field of resistance—wobbly, not linear; intense, not predetermined. Every contribution—words, labor, material support—feeds this shared resource. Every exchange refuses scarcity, asserting that solidarity is not symbolic but structural.

To reset this paper is to acknowledge that AWC has never been static. Indeed it has been a ​​seismograph of the crisis of our times, becoming an institution without stability. But, what does it mean to reset, when our political, social, and economic surroundings are constitutively unsettling? Resetting is not erasing; it is reckoning with the conditions that shape intellectual and artistic work and choosing, again and again, how to move forward out of precarity, in shaping, to the extent we can, new conditions altogether. We’ve come to despise precarity—not romanticizing it is not enough. To work against it is an act of maintenance, a commitment to staying purposeful without succumbing to spectacle, to making space for new voices without abandoning the legacies that brought us here.

If every issue is a map of shifting and enduring solidarities, then resetting is the work of mapping the fields we inhabit and ensuring we are still charting the right coordinates. This labor is dedicated to you, reader, comrade, lover, vendor, shoplifter, criminal, kweens – and to our joint horizons.

With features by Octavia Abril, Julieta Arandas, Tony Balseca, Pamela Cevallos, Marcel Cedeño, Sepp Eckenhaussen, Kathy García, Martha Hellion, Pablo Hermida, Amelie Jakubek, Daniela Labra, Movimiento GRSB, Nachbarschaftshaus Urbanstraße e.V., Hortensia Pico, María Inés Plaza Laz, Krishan Rajapakshe, Blanca Rivadeneira, Sonia Rosales, Jerónimo Ruedi, Lilo Ruminawi, Amelia Sánchez Mosquera, Pauł Sochacki, Rocío Soria, Trinidad Perez, Ana Cristina Vásquez, Rico Zyrrano