On Saturday 9th September SOTA (State of the Arts, Belgium) and friends and collaborators celebrated the launch of the Fair Kin Arts Almanac with a brunch and a parade through Brussels, with various pitstops, readings, and performances en route. The publication includes the voices of more than 130 artists, writers, and activists spinning their thoughts and experiences into 12 chapters around a year: Politics, Making Space, Education and Beyond, Parenthood, Accessibility, Ecology, Mutuality, Rest, Migration, Redistribution, Property and Open Source, and Relationality.
‘This book is a wheel – a wheel of kinship. Place it vertically in front of you, open its pages and spread them evenly around its spine. The wheel of kinship is circling around an essential working field of our society – the field of the arts.’
I was delighted to be able to contribute to the Almanac, in the form of texts for the chapter on education written collaboratively with the Out of Order Contemplaters (some of my former classmates from Autonomous Design at KASK) and an article on the Basic Income for Artists pilot scheme in Ireland for the chapter on redistribution.
It’s a beautiful polyphonic well of thoughts, ideas, essays, poems, interviews, tools, inspiring examples, practical information, illustrations and recipes. If you have any connection to the arts and often find yourself thinking about how we can create better working conditions in the field, in Belgium or otherwise, I highly recommend getting your paws on a copy! You can order one here for €20, or by sending an email to politix@state-of-the-arts.net. Alternatively you can email me if you want to borrow mine for a bit!