The art and culture sector in Germany has been among the first fields targeted in the post-October 7 authoritarian turn: censorship, cancellations, funding withdrawal, and a range of intimidation techniques enacted through institutional procedures. Art Worker Solidarity emerged from this moment. What are the cardinal values that hold the group together?
After October 7, 2023, many art workers in Berlin felt isolated. Many of us faced police repression at protests, while the majority of German cultural institutions appeared to be unwilling or unable to share political values that, for many of those active in Berlin’s international art scene, remain central: solidarity with Gaza and Palestine in the face of Israel’s ongoing genocide.
Art Worker Solidarity (AWS) formed organically through a need to resist that sense of isolation, and to act in solidarity against censorship, silencing, and repression. Many of us are freelancers. Many of us are migrants. Many of us work both inside and outside Germany. Many of us hold side jobs as technicians, cleaners, translators, teachers… Facing deliberate precarization, the erosion of cultural infrastructure through budget cuts, the abuse of public funding procedures, an onslaught of silencing and censorship, and the normalization of right-wing extremism in Berlin and beyond, we know these are not isolated phenomena. They affect not only our labor rights, but also the rights of many of us to remain here in Germany. For cultural workers, censorship and cancellation can mean a long-term loss of income and, for some, the loss of their visa. Our coming together is about far more than asserting a liberal notion of freedom of artistic expression. It is about claiming the material conditions for that freedom to be possible.
What does ideological and material solidarity look like in practice?
Solidarity becomes real when it operates at the symbolic and material levels at the same time, when it goes beyond public statements to actually change the conditions of those facing retaliation. Symbolically, it means refusal: declining to exhibit in or to lend legitimacy to complicit institutions publicly and explicitly. Materially, it means protecting cultural workers through financial support, legal knowledge, and the coordinated amplification of their cases. It means sharing resources, platforms, and access to reduce individual dependence on institutional endorsement. It means coordinating action so that boycotts and refusals exert collective pressure rather than remaining scattered gestures that institutions can simply absorb. Above all, it means building mutual aid structures that reduce the precarity that makes workers vulnerable to institutional pressure in the first place. Right now, our group is focusing on strengthening solidarity networks across sectors and internationally through our upcoming symposium.
Can you tell us more about that?
The symposium aims to create space for dialogue between different kinds of cultural workers and with precarized workers in other sectors, and to learn from unionized and self-organized cultural workers beyond Germany. Throughout two days of participatory working sessions, in-depth discussions, and collective analysis, we will exchange organizing tactics, map the political, legal, economic, and psychological conditions shaping our work, and examine how precarity is weaponized to discipline dissent. Together, we will explore ways to counter complicity, particularly in relation to supply chains and funding structures, while building solidarity across different places and types of precarized work.
Part of what we hope to do is contextualize our work here in Germany. Collaborating with artists’ unions and organizations abroad is a way to show that it should be completely normal, uncontroversial even, for an artists’ organization to speak out against genocide and war. Highlighting how these struggles intersect helps us mobilize more broadly and build alliances across the groups pushing back against the authoritarian turn from a position of solidarity with Palestine. This involves both grassroots activism and people organizing within cultural and academic institutions.
The symposium is independent and volunteer-organized. We have some (minimal) funding for travel costs and food from Movement Hub, an organization that supports progressive grassroots movements and civil society groups. Most of the money for these costs, however, was raised through a fundraiser event and through sales of our zine, How do we self-organize?, which documents the first large-scale event we hosted at the nGbK last year. Copies of the zine can be found at Zabriskie in Berlin.
How does the symposium propose to lay the groundwork for an enduring international coalition, rather than remaining another moment of convergence that disperses without creating an enduring structure?
The symposium’s second day is planned around exactly this question. Enduring relationships grow through conversation and through genuinely understanding the needs of everyone involved. We want to create space to hear about the different contexts and motivations that drove each group to organize, and to build a structure that is shaped by all present, practicing a solidarity and allyship that leaves nobody behind. We hope this gathering can serve as a starting point for wider cooperation. We also plan to document the event by producing a second zine in the coming months, so stay tuned.
There has long been a hope that art can confront reality and exist independently of the institutions that produce, fund, and legitimize it. The last few years have made this assumption increasingly untenable. How does Art Worker Solidarity position itself in relation to institutions?
We are a large group with different positions among members, and this is a topic of productive dissent among us. Institutions are too all-encompassing to ignore. But as you point out, they can also operate as machines for propagating German Staatsräson. In a context of rising authoritarianism, we have to constantly ask ourselves: should we continue to engage constructively with the ostensible liberal institution, holding it accountable and pushing it to, at the bare minimum, do its job of holding space for dissensus and solidarity? Or is the institution the wolf in sheep's clothing, absorbing, or even appropriating, our political energy?
Complete withdrawal is often a privilege available only to those with independent resources or established reputations, and it removes organized pressure from the very spaces where workers and publics actually encounter institutions. So our position in relation to institutions has to remain ambivalent. It is harder to hold this position than either full integration or principled separation, but perhaps this is more honest about the terrain on which cultural labor politics must actually operate. That said, as the state divests monetarily from culture while amping up ideological controls, and as institutions turn to private funding sources, we will need to find ways to materially support culture workers when they say “no” to institutions that are complicit in militarized supply chains.
What might a different art governance system actually look like?
In our work, we have been drawn to the union as a productive counter-figure to the artists’ association. For example, Gewerkschafter für Gaza has demonstrated the historical and ongoing connections between the German union system and state Zionism. As cultural workers and freelancers, we ask ourselves how collective organizing around our labor rights (which include the right to artistic freedom of expression) might lead toward a cultural system that actually cares for the material wellbeing of all its workers, from creators to technicians to institutional staff to cleaners. This would be a first step toward wresting control of cultural infrastructure, transforming a system that is highly vulnerable to state and corporate interests into something decentralized, democratically organized, and responsive to different needs. It would need to be structured around the needs of both culture workers and their publics.
At the same time, we have to ask what a truly subversive union might look like, one that looks beyond the legal and often parochial parameters of industry protection to form solidarities with precarized workers in other fields and other places, or to mobilise around political urgencies like the ongoing genocide in Gaza. This idea sits far outside existing models of corporate bargaining, even if those models were to become fully accessible to freelancers. But it is also a complete no-brainer. Many of us work day jobs in other sectors, so drawing hard lines between different types of labor struggle makes little sense. Solidarity is both a matter of survival and of political urgency.
Beyond individual acts of censorship, how do you understand the deeper ways in which parts of the cultural system have been shaped by, or made structurally dependent on, funding sources, supply chains, and political relationships that are implicated in the very crises culture workers are trying to address?
Arms manufacturers, fossil fuel corporations, authoritarian governments, and financial institutions fund cultural institutions partly to launder their reputations, using cultural legitimacy to offset the political costs of their core operations. The effect on programming is typically indirect: curators learn through accumulated institutional signals what work will generate friction with donors, and adjust accordingly. Often, no explicit directive is needed; anticipatory compliance becomes widespread inside funding-dependent organizations. The dependency is asymmetrical: funders can withdraw at any time, while institutions cannot easily replace large donors and, therefore, cannot afford to antagonize them. Cultural legitimacy gets continuously lent to the economic and political power that funds it, reinforcing both.
How does Art Worker Solidarity think about untangling those dependencies?
Slowly and collectively, across several fronts at once. Divestment campaigns demand that institutions formally sever ties with harmful industries, making complicity an active institutional choice rather than a background condition. Running alongside all of this, currently, AWS works on building parallel infrastructure: supporting or making independent spaces, events, publications, and networks. This can demonstrate that alternatives are viable and provide ground for work that captured institutions cannot accommodate.
How have you formalized, or chosen not to formalize, your structure?
We hold regular monthly meetings. Anyone can join and propose a theme to work on, for which a subgroup is usually formed that self-organizes as it sees fit. As much as possible, we make decisions by consensus and rotate tasks. We also host larger events like the symposium, and smaller-scale events we call “Union Halls” to create formal and informal contexts for cultural workers to come together, exchange, eat and drink, share experiences, and develop shared analyses. This may sound basic, but in a moment when many cultural institutions and associations in this city still appear to be in acute denial of the political urgencies shared by so many cultural workers, when it is often unclear who you can trust, it is so important to create alternative spaces where we can collectivize our concerns and strengthen one another.
What political horizon does the coalition move toward?
Now more than ever, it is clear that capitalism and fascism move hand in hand in pursuing a neo-colonial agenda within and outside the borders of the nation-state. This gives rise to some frightening developments at a local level. The question of who has visibility in the cultural field, and who sets its agenda, is deeply connected to the question of who can access basic rights: housing, social welfare, environmental protection, freedom from police violence and state repression, and freedom of movement. These issues are as relevant to us as questions around funding, wages, working conditions, and freedom of artistic expression. If one of us is affected, all of us are affected.
We see our work as part of an anti-racist struggle, which includes the fight against the weaponization of anti-Semitism. As cultural workers, we push back against the foreclosure of political imagination. Art has the potential to build social spaces for encounter and to foster lived, intersectional solidarity through relationships and community. As a relatively small, self-organized structure, we hope to avoid political purity tests and instead create space for developing relational skills, discussion, dissent, political learning, and mutual support. We hope that ours is one of many bottom-up approaches from which radical, collectively run structures can grow. Modes of self-organization can restructure not just culture but infrastructure more broadly, holding it accountable to people’s needs rather than to the demands of militarized state structures and private, profit-driven interests. In this sense, too, our work is currently oriented toward reaching out to other sectors and working translocally against the authoritarian turn.
How do you navigate conflicts and misalignments within the group, and how do you build something that can outlast the urgency of the current moment?
Self-organized groups are not communities of perfect agreement. They are temporary, sometimes unstable, always negotiated arrangements between people who share enough—a common struggle, an overlapping demand, a convergent interest—to act together without requiring unanimity on everything else.
There is a recurring temptation in political life to mistake rigor for rigidity, to treat ideological consistency as the primary measure of solidarity. Purity politics, whatever its ideological clothing, tends toward the same destination: a smaller and smaller circle of the trustworthy, and a longer and longer list of disqualifying positions, and, ultimately, a politics more invested in its own integrity than in the world it claims to want to change.
Political clarity is something different. It means knowing what you are fighting for and why, having a coherent analysis of power, harm, and structural causes, without requiring that everyone who stands beside you arrived at that analysis by the same route or holds every adjacent position in the same way. Clarity allows you to build. Purity tends to dissolve what has been built.
What are the tools of dissent that culture and art workers can deploy within their own sector?
The available tools range widely. Open letters and public statements are relatively low-risk entry points, capable of naming problems and building momentum, though they are limited when used alone. Collective refusals and boycotts raise the cost of complicity for institutions. Whistleblowing and leaking internal censorship decisions can expose structural problems that are invisible from outside, but they carry serious professional and legal consequences for anyone acting alone. Strike actions are among the most materially powerful tools available, making visible the labor that institutions prefer to treat as unconditionally available. Counter-programming and autonomous publishing create platforms for work that complicit institutions will not host. Legal challenges to wrongful dismissal or censorship serve both protective and political functions. Solidarity networks address the core vulnerability that keeps most dissent from developing beyond individual courage: the isolation of the person willing to act.
Across all of these, the same tension recurs: individual exposure against collective protection. Dissent becomes sustainable when costs and risks are distributed across a network, not concentrated on isolated individuals whose precarity institutions can exploit. That is why we advocate organizing as a remedy to the atomization so often produced by austerity and political volatility.
Thank you all for this!
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The Art Worker Solidarity group was formed in response to known cases of censorship and silencing of visual artists in Berlin due to positions of solidarity with Palestine, as well as the ongoing, intentional precarization of artists through defunding and attempted deportation, all of which are exacerbated by the rise and normalization of right-wing extremism. Rather than seeing these as isolated phenomena, Art Worker Solidarity seeks to collectively push back against repression by establishing and strengthening intersectional networks of solidarity.
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Symposium: Culture Workers Organizing Against the Authoritarian Turn
April 11–12, 2026
Organized by Art Worker Solidarity
Hosted by anorak
Gottlieb-Dunkel-Str. 43/44
12099 Berlin-Tempelhof
https://anorakanorak.com/
Participating groups: Artists & Culture Workers London, Artists' Union England, Buradan Nereye? (Türkiye), European Alternatives, Hassala, Scottish Artists Union, UKS (Young Artists' Society, Norway), Arts & Culture Alliance Berlin, FLINTA* Workers Mutual Support Network, Global South United, KriSol (Alliance for Critical Scholarship in Solidarity), Oyoun, Radio Against Repression, Red Kunstcol, Syndikat Kunst und Kultur, United Against Subcontracting, Zeitgenössischer Tanz Berlin, and many more...
Open to all grassroots groups and individuals seeking to build and connect local and international organizing efforts. Join us!
Program
Saturday, April 11
Mapping the Terrain: Authoritarianism and Cultural Work
11:00–11:30: OPENING
Coffee and welcome
Brief framing of the two-day gathering and its aims
11:30–13:00: INTRODUCTIONS
Invited groups introduce themselves
13:00–14:00: LUNCH
14:00–15:30: PARALLEL WORK SESSIONS
(A): On material labor conditions, precarity, repression
(B): Building and sustaining organizing structures
(C): Fighting complicity, trans-sectoral action
15:30–16:00: COFFEE BREAK
16:00–17:30: PLENARY REPORT-BACK
Summaries from the work sessions, discussion, preparation for Day 2
17:30–20:30: EVENING DRINKS
Sounds from Radio Against Repression
Sunday, April 12
From Shared Analysis to Collective Action
12:00–13:00: REFLECTIONS OVER BRUNCH
Summary of Day 1, updates, intentions for the day
13:00–13:30: COALITION PROPOSAL
How can we support each other in the future?
Proposing an anti-authoritarian, international coalition
13:30–15:00: PARALLEL WORK SESSIONS
(A): Building a coalition: what are our shared struggles and how do we connect them?
(B): Organizational forms: how might a coalition be structured?
15:00–15:30: COFFEE BREAK
15:30–16:00: PLENARY REPORT-BACK
Summaries from the work sessions
Decision-making on how to stay in touch
16:00–17:00: CALL TO ACTION!
Call to action, action points, commitments
17:00–17:30: Closing thoughts, feedback round
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