Arts Organizing before Precarity and Crisis: The Case of Portuguese Art Workers

The outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic has thrown a spotlight on the arts sector worldwide. In Portugal, art workers immediately responded to provide access to culture and citizenship in unconventional places and to adapt to an online presence performing mostly free work. Simultaneously, the sector's structural precarity, that had always existed, has been chronically exposed, also raising the visibility of non- creative professionals in the art worlds (mediators, operators, technicians). On the private sector side, some reference cultural institutions took advantage of the crisis to advance neoliberal agendas of cuts and dismissals. Before the absence of government response to a sector comprised mainly by independent and informal workers, arts professionals started an unprecedented and persistent process of organizing for claiming urgency measures addressing their basic survival needs, but also a consistent policy and statute for the sector. This paper will discuss the changes happening in the Portuguese art worlds from two main standpoints: (1) the role of the State in the (de)regulation and (de)professionalization of the sector, when great responsibility should be exercised in the definition of public policies guaranteeing access to adequate labour rights and social protection to all workers; and (2) the ways arts professionals have been organizing to cope with precarity and crisis, through different forms of collective organization (worker collectives, shared service cooperatives, mutual support systems, inter- organizational collaboration, protest and collective action). The Portuguese case is taken as a case study of a reality that is affecting arts professionals worldwide, demanding a discussion at national and supranational levels