Arts of the Working Class - Elisa Fuenzalida
Weaving from below, plotting from the cracks
Block Seminar, English, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
2 Weekends, Saturdays/Sundays, 10-17 h each day: 3.6./4.6. (Hardenbergstr. 33, Room 101) & 17./18.6.2023 (Hardenbergstr. 33, Room 150)

Photo credit: David Sánchez "Misia" by Juan Carlos Leiva (Lima, 2005) courtesy of the author

Registration on Moodle starts on the 17th of April / Anmeldung auf Moodle beginnt am 17.4.2023: https://moodle.udk-berlin.de/moodle/course/view.php?id=1829
Moodle Enrollment Key / Einschreibeschlüssel: magazine

In this seminar, we invite students to participate collaboratively in working on and contributing to the Issue 28 of the magazine Arts of the Working Class. The magazine is an international, multilingual non-profit magazine that sets a counterweight to exclusive and excluding art magazines. The seminar is led by Elisa Fuenzalida, editor of Art of the Working Class and has four major sessions.

In the first session, we will perform a series of exercises and dynamics that will allow us to feel the social class from the experience of the body. From this base, we will address the unstable and contextual ways in which privilege and oppression operate and modes of re-reading the art-class intersection. The issue "To Perform or not to Perform" of Arts of the Working Class will serve as a bibliography to question these assumed binarisms.
In the second session, we will address the relationship between hegemony and knowledge/culture for which we propose to refute the parameters of rationality on the basis of which this connection has been historically imposed. It is a matter of imagining together questions and words to decenter the axes of power that intervene in the legitimization of production, transmission and visibility of the aesthetic experience. To begin with, we propose to think and discuss about novel concepts such as "indiscipline" and "crack" (Catherine Walsh), "re-existence" (Adolfo Albán Achinte), "artistic activisms" (RedCSur), all of them part of the horizon of meanings of Arts of the Working Class, as we will see through a brief bibliography.
In the third session, we will make a call to plotting from these shared conversations, readings, encounters and visions, through an invitation to collaborate collectively in Issue 28 as part of the annual "Burst of Solidarity" editorial axis and builds on the notion of Trusts to address the multiple intersections between territoriality, land, art, class, body and radical imagination. The topic, perspective and format will be discussed and selected at this stage.
The fourth session will be entirely dedicated to the elaboration and edition of this text.

Requirements for the ungraded Studium Generale credits:active and regular participation & tba.

Elisa Fuenzalida (Perú, 1978) is editor of the street newspaper for art & society, wealth & poverty – Art of the Working Class – and curator in the network of citizen participation laboratories Redes por el Clima and the Decolonial Anibal Quijano Chair in Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. Since 2019 she has also been researching at the crossroads of sound art and archives. Her first piece was Ensamblajes del Cuidado [Assemblages of Care], which collected the testimonies and sounds of modes of solidarity during the collapse of the public health system in Peru in the context of the pandemic (Centro Cultural de España, Lima, Perú). Her latest work, El Futuro era tu Cuerpo [The Future was your Body], is a series of sound capsules regarding the memory of grief and care in the travesti and trans communities of Peru in the 1990s (Our Many Europes: Rethinking the 90s Grant).

Arts of the Working Class is a multi-lingual street journal on poverty and wealth, art and society: is published every two months and contains contributions by artists and thinkers from different fields and in different languages. Its terms are based upon the working class, meaning everyone, and it reports everything that belongs to everyone. Everyone who sells this street journal earns money directly. Vendors keep 100% of the sales. Every artist whose work is advertised, designs with us its substance.