Low-Budget Projects: do not expect anything out of the blue

Join us on 6 May at Framer Framed for the zine launch of Low-Budget Projects with initiator, Gizem Üstüner . Low-Budget Projects is a roaming collection and publication office that speaks about the non-artistic labor that plays a crucial role in every artistic production.

The project concerns the precarious aspect of the everyday politics of freelance life, such as the stress of an unpaid bill or rent, an overdue visa application fee or invoice, a rejected or unanswered funding proposal, an imbalance of many side jobs with temporary or no contracts, a negotiation with an employer for fair paid hours, and many more.

Rather than seeking solutions to larger problems, the project aims to serve urgent responses to survive precarity on a daily basis, whilst looking at various forms of resistance practiced by many art and cultural workers. It focuses on understanding and redefining these hidden dramas, calls attention to the actual financial streams that fund a cultural practice. How do we, artists and cultural workers, make our work possible?

Do not expect anything out of the blue is an edition of the project with VAT FREE bags, replicating the blue envelopes sent by the Dutch tax authority. In the same layout, same shape, and same shade of blue, these bags come with a different motivation. The bags archive and distribute narratives about the alternative models of financial organization being built to sustain cultural practices on a daily basis, aiming to make them visible, important and valuable outcomes of work. Holding regular gatherings after each tax quarter, the project opens up space for skill-sharing and invites freelancers from different backgrounds to discuss possibilities of self-governance in the existing economic and political infrastructures of the cultural field.