Culture Workers Organising Against the Authoritarian Turn

International Unionising Symposium in Berlin

11 – 12 April 2026

Gottlieb-Dunkel-Str 43/44, Berlin-Temppelhof

As far-right and authoritarian projects gain ground, institutions remain complicit in or silent on genocidal warfare and expanding militarisation. Cultural work has become a decisive terrain where fear, nostalgia, identity, and hegemony are produced, contested, and normalised. To counteract this, culture workers are challenged to build new solidarity structures beyond their own fields.

Organised by the Art Worker Solidarity group in Berlin this two-day symposium brings together culture workers, artists, organisers, unions, and precarised workers’ groups from across Europe and beyond.

Through participatory working sessions, in-depth discussions, and collective analysis, we will exchange organising tactics, map the political, legal, economic, and psychological conditions shaping our work, and examine how precarity is weaponised to discipline dissent. Together, we will investigate ways to counter complicity – particularly in the relation to supply chains and funding structures – while building solidarity between different places and types of precarised work.

The current moment calls for a renewed political imagination. This symposium proposes to lay the groundwork for an enduring international coalition to sustain long-term anti-authoritarian struggle. Open to all grassroots groups and individuals seeking to build and connect local and international organising efforts.

The Art Worker Solidarity group was formed in response to know cases of censorship and silencing of visual artists in Berlin due to their positions in solidarity with Palestine, as well as the ongoing, intentional precarisation of artists through defunding and attempted deportation, all of which are exacerbated by the rise and normalisation 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.