Art Taaalkssss: María Inés Plaza Lazo

From Vagabunden Festival, Summer 2020

For Art Taaalkssss art historian and curator María Inés Plaza Lazo (born in Guayaquil, Ecuador) presents her work as co-publisher of Arts of the Working Class (AWC), a Berlin-born homeless multilingual street newspaper published every two months, which includes contributions by artists and thinkers from different fields and countries. AWC is aimed at the working class, that is, at everyone, and is about everything that belongs to everyone. Street sellers keep the full price, while artists whose work is featured help to design.

Anti-racism and anti-classism require a very thorough anchoring in cultural practice in order to bring about tangible change. For Arts of the Working Class, it is just as important to break down barriers of precarization as it is to let different languages and experiences speak for themselves. AWC’s autumn issue Eurothanasia focuses on the geopolitical space of Eurasia, in particular on voices from hybrid post-Soviet contexts, which are often underrepresented. AWC proposes to break through the result of a capitalist understanding of a culture that constantly reproduces the contrast between peripheries and centers worldwide, by shedding light on the particularities of this rich area and many of its obvious contradictions.