The AltCom 2016 festival is organised by Tusen Serier & CBK and will take place in Malmö, July 28-31.
WHAT: AltCom 2016: WORK – international comics festival for alternative/underground comix
WHEN: July 28-31 of 2016
WHERE: Malmö, in the dirty south of Sweden, at The Hybrid and neighboring spaces in Mitt Möllan + Folkets Park
WHY: Because YOU deserve it, you smokers and drinkers
The guest list isn’t complete yet, the exhibitions aren’t all confirmed, but we have the venues (various spaces at Mitt Möllan & Folkets Park) and lots of plans.
In a number of exhibitions, a free anthology (thanks to our Kickstarter supporters) and a comics fair with a mix of international and local comics creators, we explore this year’s theme:
WORK
We sell our time, we sell great portions of our lives and how much we are worth seems to differ a lot depending on whom we sell ourselves to, on the work environment and what kind of tasks we have. We are often cheaper the more our work tears down our bodies. Also often depending on who we are, where we come from, etc.
Some work with owning and administering capital and means of production. Others work with cleaning their offices. Some of us work in cooperatives, others in large or small corporations. Some are run their own companies because of their entrepreneurial spirit, others because they have to to get jobs in their line of work. Some are making phone calls, bothering people, and it’s permitted and encouraged only because it’s a job. If you’d do it on your own time it wouldn’t be ok.
And some don’t have a “real” job but do other things, like selling sex, begging, selling drugs. Jobs that don’t count as jobs but follow the same basic rule: you sell goods or services for money, or you satisfy the customers’ view of what you are (the image of the whore, the image of the poor). There is also danger involved; the risk of being subjected to violence both from the people you deal with at work and from the police, the ones whose job it is to protect (some of) us.
And then we have Phase 3 (Swedish measure for long-term unemployed), where employers often receive more money than the ones selling their work through institutionalized coercion. Where people are expected to work for someone who doesn’t provide a real salary. In a way, but not at all, like the slaves who harvest the cocoa, the coffee or the diamonds that we happily consume, pretending that there’s no cost in human blood.
And there is the unpaid work that’s performed on equal terms, where everyone works for free for something they believe in, where money is not the driving force.
What is your work? How is it organized? Who gets the profits? How much of your time is spent on work? Does a job have to be so much work? What can you do to improve the situation at your workplace? Thoughts to think of, questions to answer…
Maybe you will find some answers in the festival anthology, at the exhibitions or at the comics market during AltCom 2016, the fourth edition of Malmo’s underground comics festival.
AltCom 2016, with support from
Malmö Stad
Region Skåne
Kulturrådet
and the lovely Kickstarter crowd…
