Work in Crisis

The ever-widening gap between rich and poor, accelerated climate change and, most recently, the state of emergency of the Corona crisis leave no doubt about the need for profound social and economic changes.

On the discourse platform Work in Crisis, artists, theorists, and activists seek answers to fundamental questions - with a special focus on what can be learned from artistic processes about the nature of production and work today:

How secure and sustainable are global financial, economic and social systems based on value creation? How are digitality and artificial intelligence changing work and production? How must work change in the face of climate catastrophe? What new connections between local, regional and planetary thinking should be found now? How can new forms of collaboration and collectivity, how can social production be thought as a whole?

With contributions by Bini Adamczak, Dirk Baecker, María do Mar Castro Varela, Manfred Fischedick, Julia Grillmayr, Daniel Häni, Bernadette La Hengst, Brigitta Muntendorf, Dan Perjovschi, Sibylle Peters and others.

The discourse platform, conceived by Christian Esch and Florian Malzacher, was created as part of the program After Supervising the Machines, a joint project of NRWKS and the LVR Industrial Museum in Engelskirchen that used artistic means to address current questions about work on the occasion of Friedrich Engels' 200th birthday in 2020. The focus was on diverse artistic and discursive activities in Engelskirchen and on the Internet.