Collectivising labour otherwise: Art Workers’ Union in Lithuania

The article explores how new subjects and organisational forms arise in the arts in response to systemic precarisation in post-socialist countries exacerbated by the wholesale arrival of neoliberalism. Focusing on the Art Workers’ Union, an organisation founded by the authors in Lithuania in 2023, the case study examines how a new collective subject, the ‘art worker’, formed during COVID-19 to deindividuate the struggle against precarity. It also shows how a new organisational form – the first independent labour union for art workers in the post-socialist Baltics – was instituted to respond to systemic precarity and legitimise art work as labour. This process is identified as ‘collectivising otherwise’: instantiating collective imaginaries distinct from precarising structures in the arts.