In our time of commodified sociality, housing crisis, and inflation, appealing to the healing power of communities, depends on how many of us can sit down in a circle after a long day of darkness, and take the word to create a safe space for all. However, the latency of patriarchal, capitalist, and neo-colonialist and the impossibility of replicating something other than the segregation of our proximity emerges in the ways we organize public spaces and relate to one another. Guided by the spirit of questioning the naturalized rules that shape our togetherness, AWC's 2024 editorial research program is titled Codes of Conduct.
Codes of Conduct will operate a semantic shift, by bridging nation-hegemonic formations, with wishful thinking of locally rehearsed practices: communal determinism and risk taking. By collaborating with Mataré-Haus, Arts of the Working Class explores the mesh of interests in the city of Düsseldorf, to speak about how migration policies and its visual representation, politics of affections, as well as tools of disruption and harmonization have defined it, by example of contemplations done through the gaze of fellows of the Mataré-Haus and different protagonists of North Rhine Westphalia (tbc).
With its issue no. 31: Foreigners Everywhere, AWC visits the garden stage, an installation built by Gregor Lau with a blind painted by Sophie Hallermann and Dietmar Lutz, artistic director of the Mataré-Haus. To counter the hegemonic codes of conduct of power, the conversations that will define the launch event will confront the unpopular limitations of contemporary discourses and artistic education, not by undermining the energies of those who exercise, but to find methodologies to look together for coherences between economic, aesthetic and political accountability.
